Truth Unites - Am I Liberal?

Episode Date: March 15, 2025

Gavin Ortlund interacts with the concern that he is a liberal, addressing creation, the flood, and view of non-Protestant traditions.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

Defending yourself is very tricky. On the one hand, you don't want to be just defensive. There's lots of sinful temptations in that direction, and there's so many times I'm learning a lot about this, where it's just best to ignore criticism because engaging it is not productive. On the other hand, sometimes defending yourself is appropriate and helpful. There could be a temptation in this direction of cowardice at times. And we have precedent in Scripture in 2 Corinthians, for example. I love Paul's language of an open statement of the truth to commend ourselves to everyone's conscience. Sometimes I've discovered defending yourself can even be pastoral for onlookers, where people are genuinely confused. It can kind of be a teaching moment. So here I want to respond to the charge that I'm a liberal. I do find, I honestly do find it kind of a laughable claim. I don't mean to be offensive to those who have the, who, who see it differently. I think to any actual liberal, you know, like I was thinking of atheists who will watch this video,

who watch my YouTube channel, and they're kind of look at me from the opposite angle. because I defend the Bible in its record of the issue of slavery or the conquest of Canaan, and I do videos defending Christianity on those topics. And so they see me as this like arch patriarchal type person. I'm basically a pretty traditional evangelical in the tradition of someone like John Stott. I believe in biblical inerrancy. I believe marriage is between one man and one woman. I'm complementarian.

I've defended these things and many other such things in print, kind of classical evangelical viewpoint, really. but people often call me a liberal for three reasons. One is that I reject Young Earth creationism. A second is that I think the flood of Noah was probably a local or regional event. And a third is that I think traditions outside of Protestantism can be Christian. Now I'm not going to argue for these three views here. Instead, let me give some historical context and then two thoughts at the end about how to have conversations about these kinds of issues. First, on creation, many people today are unaware that earth, Earlier in the modern era, the leading figureheads for opposition to theological liberalism frequently rejected Young Earth creationism. Jay Grascha Machen was perhaps the great opponent of theological liberalism in all the, certainly the early 20th century. He's calling conservative Christians to fight against the modernists and cling to the fundamentals

of the faith. He said it's certainly not necessary to think that the six days spoken of in the first chapter of the Bible are intended to be six days of 24 hours each. We may think of them rather as very long periods of time. B.B. Warfield, perhaps did more than anyone to uphold the authority and inerrancy of scripture against higher criticism. He's very clear, not a younger creationist. The only debates are about how much evolution he allowed for and that kind of thing. You can see on the screen of perspective of his view. So right on it, already you can just sort of ask, you know, is Machen a liberal? Is Warfield or his other colleague at old Princeton, Charles Hodge, a liberal? What about the great Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon? What's interesting about Spurgeon is when he would talk in his sermons about creation, he would speak apparently without hesitation and just casually about millions of years before Adam, for example. He doesn't seem to feel anxiety about this or a need to justify his view because the issue of the age of the earth and the nature of the days of Genesis was not as controversial in his day.

In the 19th century and into the 20th century, many fundamentalists rejected Young Earth creationism. Take the classic book, The Fundamentals, published in 1910, edited by R.A. Tori. This is kind of a defining set of texts for what will come to be called fundamentalism. And some of the contributors are Young Earth, others are Old Earth. They get along just fine. The Young Earth people are not accusing the Old Earth people of not being real fundamentalists or something like that. Tori himself founded Biola University, and he was the first pastor, if I recall, at the Church of the Open Door, famous church in Los Angeles.

And he claimed anyone who is at all familiar with the Bible and the way the Bible uses words knows that the use of the word day is not limited to 24 hours. There is no necessity whatsoever for interpreting the days of Genesis 1 as solar days of 24 hours length. The Schofield reference Bible, enormously popular in the 20th century among fundamentalists, well, advocated for the Gap theory, a species of Old Earth creationism. William Jennings Brian, who represented the prosecution at the Scopes trial, held to a day-age view of Genesis 1, that's Old Earth creationism. So again, you know, you ask was William Jennings Brian a liberal? Is the Schofield Reference Bible? Liberal. Is R. A. Torre a liberal? We could add so many names to

this list. Herman R. R. C. Sproll. R. C. Sproll. Edward J. Young, James Montgomery Boyce, who was the chairman of the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy and pastored 10th Prez in Philadelphia for decades. It's very clear that his view, you can see on the screen, he thinks the earth and universe are billions of years old. So, in other words, to see some historical context for this, you don't need to appeal just to the evangelicals, like Carl Henry and Harold John Ockin-Gay and Billy Graham. You can even look to many of those who would be to the right of them, including many

fundamentalists. What about in the early church? I wrote a whole book about Augustine on this topic. He didn't think the days of Genesis were ordinary days. He thought they were a metaphor to convey instantaneous creation. He saw this as kind of a literary framework. And this is a common view. Before Augustine, you have Clement and origin down in Alexandria. You have didamis. You have Athanasius, the great defender of the deity of Christ. He also, as you can see on the screen, this is one summary quote. He's summarizing his earlier statements about an instantaneous creation. After Augustine, this idea of instantaneous creation is qualified by Gregory the Great, one of the most influential Christians after Augustine. It's then propagated out by Bede and Isidore of Seville, so it becomes

mainstream and huge in the medieval Western tradition, not universal, but very common. Many pre-modern Christians all throughout church history have affirmed that animal death is good. It's not the result of human sin. It's part of how God made the world. Here's a passage from Augustine to that effect. In other videos, I've documented Thomas Aquinas and Basel and so many others as well. So if you need to read Genesis 1 in a literal to not be a liberal, we can just ask, was Athanasius a liberal? Was Augustine a liberal? Now, I'm trying to give historical context here. I hope it's clear that I'm not trying to argue against Young Earth creationism right now. Rather, I'm trying to show that seeing this as a litmus test for whether you're liberal is an eccentric classification.

So for people who watch my YouTube channel who are of a Young Earth Creationist perspective, by all means, God bless you, advocate for your view, make your argument, you are my fellow Christians, you are most welcome to advocate for the truth. What I'm just saying is, let's not, what most of you, vast majority of Young Earth Creationists I know, understand, this isn't a litmus test for liberalism. So just say Gavin Ortland is wrong. wrong on creation. Don't say he's wrong on creation and therefore he's a liberal. Because when someone says, if you reject Youngerth creationism, then you're a liberal, and they don't even give an argument for it, what they're actually saying is, I've never studied this issue. I don't have any

awareness of Christianity outside my own little parochial context, because that's an eccentric classification that would mean all these fundamentalists and the warriors for conservative, you know, for the fundamentals themselves, like Machen and Spurgeon and Warfield and Tory, et cetera, we're all liberals. And so at least you need to make an argument for that. You can't just assume that, right? So I am in no way trying to put a jab at somebody or attack somebody or demean somebody. For good faith viewers who just are exploring the truth about this, I am not trying to attack you. I am not trying to embarrass anybody. But the dogmatism and the entrenched ignorance surrounding this topic and just the way the discussion plays out today. I'll talk about the sin of slander in a second

just what is happening. The way we have these conversations, it's getting worse and worse and worse, and we need to be aware of the historical backlog to this issue. So I would just encourage us to see the difference between whether you interpret Genesis 1 literally or not as a matter of interpreting the Bible. It's not whether we accept the scripture. And I think that's so basic, but I actually I think I'm making this video because I think it needs to be said right now. Okay, what about the flood? So my view is that the flood of Noah in Genesis 6 through 8 was probably a regional event. Sometimes I say regional rather than local because when people hear the word local, they think small like a zip code. I think it was a vast flood that covered the known world. I'm just saying I don't think we need to think

of it as going to Hawaii and Japan and the South Pole, et cetera. And my reasons for this is not that I reject the account, it's that I'm trying to interpret ancient Hebrew language. This is about biblical hermeneutics. We're trying to understand for an ancient Hebrew mindset, and they don't know that Earth is a round object orbiting the sun between Venus and Mars. So when they use the words Cole Arets, all the earth, or all the land, or all the territory, what did they mean by that? What were they intending to convey by that? It's a matter of interpreting the text. And again, we we can get some perspective about this from church history. There's a long tradition of interpretation that recognizes basically the way that same language is used in Genesis 6 through 8 is used all

throughout the Hebrew Bible, including Genesis 10 and 11, for the known world. Actually, comparable language is used in the New Testament, like in Acts 2, every nation under heaven and so forth. And I've made my full case for this. You're aware if you watch my videos for this, but just a brief overview to say, this is a common view going back to the church fathers, interpreting the flood is local. You can see this passage from Theodorette on the screen. It's likely written by Theodorette. Jewish thinkers like Josephus appear to have thought of the flood as not universal throughout all the world. And that remains a common view. It's a minority view. And it's argued against by Augustine and the city of God. But it is there. And it remains there

all the way up into the modern era, including among fundamentalist Christians. This is why the great Dutch reformed theologian Hermann Bovink calls the debate between a partial versus a universal flood, an issue that has always been in discussion. And Bovink notes that most recent geologists and theologians in his day favor a partial flood, and he gives a lot of reasons for that. Bovink is not describing liberal Christians or geologists or theologians, and he himself is not a liberal. In this video that I've made, I go through a lot of examples of this.

You can see a local flood being advocated by very conservative texts like conservative study Bibles like the ESV study Bible, and you can see this wonderful, helpful note from T. Desmond Alexander, or conservative evangelical commentaries like Derek Kidner. I'll put a passage from him on the screen, or from people, a lot of people in the OPC, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Westminster Seminary in Pennsylvania, wonderful institutions, very conservative. You can see faculty at Westminster at Westminster, like the older faculty member Meredith Klein advocating for a local flood view, or Paul Seeley in the Westminster Theological Journal, or Vern Poitris, who also teaches at Westminster more recently. And we could give many, many more examples. The best overview of this in church history, the historical interpretation of the flood, is from Davis Young in this book. And he writes, by the early part of the 20th century, few biblical scholars any longer endorse the notion of a universal or geologically significant flood. Conservatives had matured in their thinking about the implications of science. They maintained an intense commitment to an infallible Bible. When they began to propose

non-traditional ways of interpreting the Deleu story that reflected this awareness, there were no cries of alarm that the Bible was being abandoned. The reason why so many conservatives took this view is because they're saying, look, to make it global, you also have to radically reshape your thinking. A lot of the people who believe in a global flood have to believe in rapid evolution after the flood, like really, really rapid, like insanely rapid evolution after the flood. There's a lot of reasons to question that view. But again, I'm not trying to attack it right now or argue against it right now. I'm just trying to explain some context to say, this is a matter of interpreting how the ancient Hebrew language works.

and I make the case more fully in my first video on this. The point for now is, if all you say is, oh, he's a liberal because he believes in a local flood, this is an expression of ignorance. This is an expression of, I've never read a book on this, and I'm just kind of going with the emotions of the moment, not historical evaluations and what has generally been true of Christianity. The third issue, and I'm not trying to say that in an insulting way to people, I just feel that, again, for good faith onlookers, please just let that glide over your shoulder if you're

just looking into this for the first time. I'm actually feeling a need to ramp it up a bit for the maliciousness of people who just try to crank these issues up, and they're literally saying it's heresy. And a lot of people don't realize what people are calling heresy is extremely common. You're literally calling people like Jay Grisham-Machan a liberal heretic. I mean, it's just It's crazy what's happening right now. That's why I feel such a burden to try to give some historical context. The third issue that I see a lot is my views of traditions outside of Protestantism. I advocate for Protestantism, obviously. This is probably the biggest thing I've gotten pulled into, not that I intended to, but I do it, and I'm happy to do it. I believe in Protestantism. I really value the Protestant

Reformation. And I think the differences between Protestant Christians and other Christian traditions are deep. They go down to the roots. They affect how the God. gospel itself. But I just hold to the same position as Luther and Calvin on the question of, how do you classify the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Church, and the Assyrian Church of the East. Essentially, despite my disagreements, which are real, I think they're part of Christianity, unlike something like Mormonism. And of course, that doesn't mean every person within them is saved, though I think many are. But I think they are Christian traditions. And here I'm maintaining what Luther taught. For example, I've used these quotes a lot.

He talks about how the Christendom under the papacy is a member of the body of Christ. Calvin says when we deny the title to the papists of the church, we're not denying churches among them. Regarding Eastern Orthodoxy, both Luther and Calvin rejected the Roman Catholic claim that what they called the Greek church had lapsed from the faith and was damned. And Calvin is saying, no, you can't make the Greeks all. schismatics. You have no right to say that. And Luther as well in the notes that John McNeil, the editor of this passage in Calvin and the institutes, McNeil quotes Luther is giving a pretty vivid expression of the same view. I have a whole video on the dialogue between later Lutheran

theologians in the 1570s and the acumenical patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremiah II. And it's very clear from that. The Lutherans regarded him as a Christian presiding over a Christian church, even though they had serious differences. Regarding the Oriental Orthodox Church, I have a video exploring the first dialogue between Luther and Melancthon. On the one hand, and an Oriental Orthodox Christian. On the other hand, they very mutually in that case saw one another clearly as Christians. Now, obviously, when we say this, we're not saying every member of this tradition is a

Christian, but we're saying, so the way you are personally a Christian, the way you get saved, the way your soul goes to heaven is by trusting in Jesus Christ, believing in the gospel, of your sin, surrendering your life to Christ. But I just think that can happen in lots of contexts outside of historic Protestant churches. And again, we can just pose the question here. If I'm a liberal for that, is Martin Luther a liberal? Is John Calvin a liberal? Or if you want to push it after the Council of Trent, there's lots of examples like that. Charles Hodge would be a clear example, Richard Hooker. I talk about that a lot in what it means to be Protestant, my book, actually chapter one. So those are for the most part, the most common criticisms

of liberalism that I will hear occasionally. There'll be other things. Sometimes people will bring up my views on climate change, though I hardly ever talk about that issue. So usually that's from people who don't really follow me regularly. They're just trying to pluck something out because I've talked about that like twice ever. And again, I just don't think caring about environmental issues like climate change makes you a liberal. In addition to church history, I think we can get perspective globally on that. There's many other places in the world where that's just not seen as a liberal issue. On that issue, I just trying to follow my conscience. I just read books about it and I form an opinion based upon the books and then I try to advocate for what I believe is true. You know, I'm always wanting to do that. I'll never

stop seeking the truth. Sometimes people call me a liberal because I have concerns about Donald Trump, but I don't think that makes you a liberal. I think there are good reasons for people who are conservative to have concerns with Donald Trump. And again, I'm just trying to follow my conscience and advocate for what is true. So I'm basically just an old school evangelical. but let me just say the concern here with the escalation of charges of liberalism against me and so many others, probably the top two concerns that I would love to put forward and just encourage us all to think about, what do we do about this right now, are slander and triage. I think we underestimate and underappreciate the seriousness of calling someone a liberal without good warrant.

That is a serious matter. That is a serious charge. I mean, liberalism, there's a real danger called liberalism. Liberalism is when you soften to the spirit of the age and you lose the gospel. For example, old school classical liberalism just denied miracles. It just caved to the pressure of the anti-supernatural bias of the day. That's a serious issue. And it's really problematic to, there's two things that are problematic.

The first thing is when people just lie about things, and this is something I see happening a lot right now. All the people who write articles about me saying Gavin believes in same-sex marriage or something like this, I'll write, and I'll say, I don't believe that. I've never said that. It's not my view. I don't, you know, I've been pretty clear on that, actually. I have a traditional view of marriage, and it doesn't affect things. They just leave the article up, and then you just see these things repeated over and over and over. So what do we do with that? Can I just ask you? Because I don't know what to do. I think it's a spiritual battle. I literally pray against the demons right now, and I'm not, not just about those articles about me, but just across the board, I think we are really undersensitive to the damage

that Satan inflicts through sins of the tongue. And, you know, James three, read James three. What it talks about is a small spark can set a forest on fire. I honestly feel like evangelicalism is on fire. And the sins of the tongue are a huge cause for this. And I'm very concerned, I'm grieved at how sluggish we are sometimes to see the seriousness of the sin of slander. We have got to think about this today. In the church right now, it seems to me we are creating an environment in which no one can flourish. An environment of suspicion and rancor, even of malice, it's not healthy. And social media is accelerating it.

I know sometimes we'll say, oh, social media isn't reality. and I agree with that, but social media affects people. I've seen churches split and Christians deeply wounded and the cause of Christ injured because of things that happen on social media. So we also can't just completely discount social media either. We have an issue. We have an issue with how we're talking about each other. Here's, you know, some of the simple things we can do is just make sure that what you're saying is true.

confirm it. If you've said something that isn't true, retract it and just acknowledge that. Everyone will respect you more if you do that. If someone else is not an honest person, don't platform them and promote that. Speak against that. How can we in the body of Christ try to reduce the amount of slander right now? And I'm not just talking about if someone calls you a liberal, if someone slanders you in some other way. Any form of slander is a serious sin. I'm really burdened. We don't take this seriously enough. that's why I'm going to defend myself if people are, because the reason I thought to make this video is actually there's so much slander that there's probably multiple articles written saying some of these things and people just believe it. And so it's at the point where it's like, okay, you've got to just

help the onlookers see the truth because again, the environment we're creating is one where honestly, C.S. Lewis could not function within the dynamics of American evangelicalism. We would tear him to shreds. B.B. Warfield, Charles Spurgeon, you know, these people could not function in the environment we're creating. We're tearing each other to shreds, and we've got to figure out a better way. Where you have genuine concerns, what you can do is, again, 2, 2nd Corinthians 4'2, give open and honest expression of concern in a spirit of truthfulness. The enemy uses lies. The other second thing besides slander is the triaging of issues. When we use the, term liberal too broadly for things that would apply to Machen and Warfield and Spurgeon,

we strengthen actual liberalism because of the boy who cried wolf dynamic. We end up watering down this term. We should work really hard to set the dials on what actually is liberalism because it's a real danger. It's a real thing. This is a huge goal. This is one of the main goals, one of the whole points of my YouTube channel, as I hope from church history to bring some perspective on these kinds of issues. And if you know my channel, you know I make a lot of videos on issues of triage and this kind of thing. And I'm officially at the point now where I will often hear people say, well, I don't agree with Gavin on everything, but I like him for this reason, or I like him for that reason. And that is good. I've put enough content out there by now.

People who pay attention, you know, it'd be a coincidence, amazing coincidence if you happen to agree with me on everything. And this is just a YouTube channel. I'm not your pastor. So just take whatever is helpful and disregard the rest. And you're welcome to argue against things but I would just, and I would say, in fact, critically evaluate everything that you hear. It's good to say, well, I agree with Gavin on this, but not on this. That's good. That's healthy. Critically evaluate everything you hear me say by scripture, just like the Bereans. Watch Truth Unites videos in the spirit of the Bereans, evaluating it by the light of scripture. And church history is a real helpful stimulus to that task because we have a lot of blind spots.

And like I'm saying, we've got a lot of eccentricities today. That's where, you know, for me, center of gravity, apostles, creed, Christianity is informed by church history. And that's why I think I just bump into things so many times. I'm like, for a lot of people today, it's more the political and cultural emotions of the moment that are determining that, and it leads us to fly off in different directions, flying off in the left a lot of times too. But all of this, at the root of all this, is a failure to do triage and the escrow.

of extremes. What I want to give my life to is a hunkering down on classical evangelical theology promoting the age-old gospel. And I don't want to ever be defensive, but I also want to not avoid speaking out and encouraging and trying to pastor people to say, hey, have you considered, you know, let's look at what some of the fundamentalists have said about this kind of thing. And I would just love to invite people to join me in the task of let's think about how do we talk about each other? How do we do triage in a way where we're not devouring each other, like Galatians 515 talks about, devouring and biting each other, but also where we are appropriately contending against errors when they are issues of real heresy or real liberalism.

And then when we have differences on the secondary and tertiary doctrines, let's debate them and argue about them and talk about them in a spirit of family, brother to brother or brother or brother to sister, as the case may be, or whatever the case may be. And let's talk with love in our hearts, knowing we're talking to someone that Jesus died for. We're talking to someone we're going to be in heaven with forever. Let there be love in our heart. A simple thing you can do is just pray for someone. You don't have to pray for someone.

You don't have to pray for God's blessing on them in what you disagree with. But you can still pray for their soul. And here's a simple thing in the body of Christ for how we can have disagreements. what we can do is we can every time you disagree with someone and before you tweet something, pray for that person. If we just did that alone, that would make a huge bit of difference. I don't know. What do you think? Am I off base here? Feel free to let me know in the comments if you have a good faith concern. You say, Gavin, you're missing something. Or maybe here's another issue that makes us think you're liberal. And this is what we want to, you know, and I'll address that in

the comments. If there's a concern about that, I'm pretty sure just across the board, my views are pretty historically classical in terms of Christian history. But I just think right now is a pretty toxic time. And the internet dynamics are escalating that up. And we're just seeing, you know, so much destruction. The forest is on fire, so to speak. We're seeing evangelicalism just fracturing apart. So what do we do about that? Well, these kinds of issues I'm talking about truthful speech, love toward others, healthy disagreement. That's why I wrote a book on disagreement, triaging issues, refocusing on the gospel, these are all the things I think we need to do. Even while we do contend against the real heresies and liberalisms of the world. So those are my thoughts. Let me know what

you think in the comments. I'll be real curious to read what you have to say about this one. Thanks for watching, everybody.