Truth Unites - Is Redeemed Zoomer Right About Evangelicals? Engaging Operation Reconquista

Episode Date: May 21, 2025

Gavin Ortlund responds to Operation Reconquista and Redeemed Zoomer's claims about evangelicals in his discussion with Trent Horn.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, 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/

Many of you will be familiar with Redeemed Zumer and the Reconquista Project, trying to take back the main line. Some of you will have watched even this dialogue that he had with Trent Horn recently. And I wanted to weigh in on some of these things. I came up a little bit in the conversation. I was thinking about it, so I was texting with a redeemed Zumer. I'm just going to call him Redemed Zumer in this video. I love the guy. We've got a good relationship.

I agree with him on a lot of things, and we're brothers in Christ. We also have some disagreements. So I was thinking about offering some thoughts. He said, yeah, absolutely go for it. we're also going to do a dialogue. We thought the best thing is I'll put out two quick points of pushback here, and then we'll also sit down. That dialogue will come out about a week after this. But to be clear, let me just state the big picture up front to set up for further dialogue is, I hope the reconquista movement succeeds. I think it's a wonderful thing. If there's a wayward church or group

within the church, and people are compelled to try to reform and draw it back to orthodoxy, I think that's a very noble goal. I think it's always a matter of wanting to be realistic about when you can do that and when you can't and so forth. And so hopefully we'll talk through all of that, but I'm not against that. I think that's great. My concerns are with his criticisms of those outside the main line, especially with evangelicals. And so let me unfold two points of pushback to set us up for further discussion here. Number one, I think it's very problematic to associate evangelicals and Anabaptists. And number two, I just want to emphasize this point. There is a a time to separate, and I'll explain what I mean by that. First, are evangelicals like the modern

day Anabaptists? I do find a lot more agreement with Catholics than evangelicals, but so did Martin Luther and John Calvin. They were much harsher against the Anabaptists than they were against the Catholics. Right. And the evangelicals today are basically the same as the Anabaptists, not identical, but evangelicals don't really have any continuity to any group. So the same things that the reformers condemned the Anabaptists for are the same things that evangelicals believe, namely anti-institutionalism and no views of sacramental efficacy. Right. And no respect for church history.

I think this association, evangelical Anabaptist, is very problematic. And I would just unfold here. First, a smaller concern about terminology and then a larger, more substantial concern. Just about terminology, let's talk about this word evangelical in Redeemed Zumer's taxonomy, You've got the people outside of Protestantism, and then you've got Protestants, and then you've got the evangelicals, and the Protestants are those that are like following the magisterial reformers like Calvin and Luther, and the evangelicals are like the Anabaptists, on whom Calvin and Luther poured a lot of contempt. And I think this use of language is very eccentric. The terms Protestant

and evangelical are kind of apples and oranges. They're different categorically, and historically they've had a lot of overlap. Most recently, the term evangelical basically just refers to your position within the fundamentalist-modernist split. So it means you're not a liberal or a fundamentalist. And so you can be an evangelical Presbyterian or an evangelical Lutheran. The founders of Fuller Seminary were parts of historic denominations. Harold John Akin Gay was an evangelical congregationalist. Carl Henry was an evangelical Baptist. Gleason Archer was an evangelical Presbyterian originally. You've got the evangelical Anglicans like John Stott and J.I. Packer. So to use the term evangelical now as if it's this separate entity from like historic confessional Protestantism,

I think is categorically confusing. I just wish Redeem Zumer would use a different term. I know what he's trying to criticize. I wish he would use a term like shallow, ahistorical Protestantism or something like that. The term evangelical has too long and rich a peddemeanical. and two biblical and etymology to use it now in this more derisive way. I'd rather have rehabilitate that term, and I just don't think it maps on as this like separate category from mainline Protestant. I just don't think it lines up. I also don't think the word non-denominational is particularly helpful. By the way, you can find non-denominational churches that are highly institutional, highly liturgical, highly theological. That's another term that gets used as in this more generalized

kind of way. So terminology, I've got all kinds of concerns, but leave those off. The more important issue is this, that whatever terms we use, even if you used a different term, it's really problematic to associate modern-day evangelicals with Anabaptists, as though the modern-day evangelicals are as much at odds with Luther and Calvin as the 16th century Anabaptists were. If there were modern-day genealogical descendants from the Anabaptists, the better candidates would be the like the Swiss brethren and the Mennonites and the Amish, though even those groups have changed a lot from the 16th century Anabaptists. But the reason why 16th century Anabaptists that Luther and Calvin opposed and evangelicals are just completely different categories is that the 16th century

Anabaptists were opposed by Luther and Calvin for a whole slew of reasons, including their social views, which were often radically subversive. So a lot of the Anabaptists believed that Christians should not serve in the government or hold a public office. Christians should not take oaths. It's not a Christian church if there are sinners within it. They had different views of divorce. Sometimes they denied original sin and imputed righteousness. Lots of other heretical beliefs you can find floating around, but the real key is their radical social views. Basically, some of them are similar to what we would call today communists. They believed in the abolition of private property. So they were seen as a menace and a threat to the social fabric. Basically, they were seen as sort of anarchists. And in some cases,

that's sort of how they were functioning. So lots of Anabaptists supported the German peasants war in 1524, 1525, where you've got hundreds of thousands of people getting slaughtered and you've got Anabaptist preachers like Thomas Munser preaching these apocalyptic messages about God's judgment is coming. It's going to be disruptive. Christians need to participate in that and so on and so forth. That is what is going on in the 16th century that is so concerning to Luther and Calvin. I'm not saying it's only those things, but that's baked in in the historical context. So just to give an example from Luther's comments about Psalm 82, where he's talking about the death penalty, he says, some heretics are seditious and teach openly that no rulers are to be tolerated, that no

Christian may occupy a position of rulership, that no one ought to have property of his own, but should run away from wife and child and leave house and home, or that all property shall be held in common. These teachers are immediately and without doubt to be punished by the rulers as men who are resisting temporal law and government. They're not only heretics, but rebels who are attacking the rulers and the government. He compares them to thieves, and murderers and adulterers and so forth. So you can see the concern on the table. This is not comparable to a modern-day Southern Baptist Church in Arkansas that doesn't

value the sacraments enough or something like that. The solution to the church that doesn't value the sacraments enough is to, in part, call them back to like read 18th century Baptist theology. But however strong you disagree with that, it's nothing like the person who refuses to submit to civil authorities. and maybe is calling for violent revolution and is abandoning their house and their wife and kids and so on and so forth. These two things are not the same at all. Luther's views are a little tricky here. He does seem to develop them a little bit over his career. And I can't pin him down exactly, but some of his

harsher expressions of the death penalty for heresy I profoundly disagree with. I'm a Baptist. I believe in religious liberty and the separation of church and state. I'm proud of those values. I'm grateful for how they have shaped the modern world in ways that all of us benefit, frankly. But the point for now is just to see the historical context. You can see why Luther and others are opposing the Anabaptists, and there's a lot more going on in that context than what you face with modern-day evangelicals. The three things that Redeemed Zumer says that link Anabaptists with evangelicals are no respect for institutions, no belief in sacramental efficacy, and no respect for church history. Now, even if those totally fair critiques. They're nothing like the social anarchy and abandoning of one's

family and communism and this kind of step that we've just documented. That was also part of that context. But even so, I would say this is an example of what I covered in a recent video about how it's trendy to criticize low church expressions of Christianity, but that a lot of those criticisms judge more by anecdotal appearance and experiences than by anything official. So, for example, take the charge of anti-institutional. That's just not correct. That is not true of evangelicals. When the evangelical movement decisively broke away from the fundamentalist movement in the 1940s,

they did found lots and lots of institutions, Fuller Seminary, Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, Christianity Today, the N-A-E, National Association of Evangelicals, ETSS, the Evangelical theological society, the Institute for Advanced Christian Studies, many, many others. Wheaton College is an evangelical institution, in my opinion, a pretty impressive one. Now, you can say that, you know, someone could say, well, those are bad institutions or something like that, but the issue here is just not anti-institutionalism, nor is it really a very penetrating critique to say evangelicals are like anti-sacramental. Again, you find that a lot. You can, again, I know what is being observed and criticized, but evangelical is not the right term for this.

Take the great evangelical awakening of the 18th century. I have a whole video about how profoundly God has used John Wesley. It's just unbelievable. John Wesley had a very high view of the sacraments. There is absolutely nothing at odds with being an evangelical and having a high view of the sacraments. So that sort of judgment is more of an anecdotal and loose one. And I think the general worry I have here is that there's too little, I feel, I think the general thing here is that I hope, Redeem Zuma and I will talk more about, is to value more the contributions of evangelical movements within church history to the cause of the gospel. Baptist missionaries, for example, take William Carey as an example, whose ministry completely transformed India. The very economy

of India was impacted by his ministry. William Carey combined evangelism with cultural respect and scholarship and practical reforms laying a long-term foundation. He built lots of institutions. He translated the Bible into over 35 Indian languages, including Bengali, Hindi, and Sanskrit. He helped establish hundreds of schools. He championed for education for girls, for vernacular education. He fought against the practice of widow burning, and his advocacy was influential in its eventual being outlawed in 1829. He campaigned against infanticide. He advocated for humane treatment of lepers and outcasts. So, you know, massive, massive impact, and he was a Baptist. And there's lots of Baptist missionaries like this, Adoniram Judson in Myanmar, Lottie Moon, in China. These are churches that don't have a kind of

strong institutional succession back. I guess the point is, tremendous good is done for the kingdom of God by these more evangelical and conservative separatist groups. And I think this is sometimes just lost in the discussion, especially, and so all of this is sort of to the effect of saying, do we really want to take the term evangelical and make that sort of a term of derision over and against the better term Protestant? Number one, it's just conceptually confusing. And number two, I think it's sort of disrespectful to that heritage. And I want to defend the evangelical heritage in its various different meanings as basically incredibly good for the world and pleasing to Christ, and we all benefit from it today in so many ways. And I think we'd be good for us to talk that through. So that's the first concern

is I'm very defensive of evangelicalism because it's, I think, very trendy to pick on right now, and we just miss a lot of the good. The second concern I have is stronger. And let me put it, set it up before showing this clip like this. Imagine you live in a town. And, there are two churches in this town, you have to choose one of these two churches to attend if you're going to go to church at all. There's First Presbyterian Church and second Presbyterian Church. First Presbyterian Church has a female pastor who performs gay marriages, is pro-choice, has a very low view of scripture and is somewhat a-theological in general. Second Prez holds to classic orthodoxy. It's pro-life, more socially conservative on issues of marriage and sexuality. But

Second Prez is a conservative split-off, maybe it's PCA, for example, and First Pres is a mainline church. From what I'm gathering, Redeemed Zuma thinks you go to First Press, and that not only do you go to First Press, but going to Second Pres would actually be cowardice and retreat. And I would say that this overvalues institutionality over fidelity, and actually a somewhat arbitrary kind of institution. And basically what I want to make a case here is no, sometimes it's okay to separate. And I'll explain that and make a case for that. But let me show his comments that spawned this thought of mind. If we're going to make apples to apples comparison, like you're going to pair the institutional Catholic Church with its doctrines and methods, the comparison must be then to an institutional

Protestant framework, which might include then confessional Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, I guess. But we have to cut off, for example, like the evangelical Lutheran Church of America or the, you know, I mean, well, they have, like, therefore, like, same-sex marriage and, like, female pastors or do you? I don't think we have to cut them off because, just because the, like, German Catholic bishops are teaching a lot of heterodoxy. It doesn't mean we say they're not Catholic. We say they're Catholics in rebellion against Catholic teaching. Well, they're not doing same-sex weddings. That's true.

But I would still, like, there are Aryan bishops in the Catholic Church in the 400s, and they're still technically Catholic bishops and stuff. They're just Catholic bishops that are heretical. So I guess, like, they're part of the institution. So you'd have a preference then for, like, let's say, like a mainline church that has these liberal views and female pastors versus, let's just say, a really conservative evangelical church that's straight down the line on abortion, same-sex marriage, male pastors only. It seems like you have a preference for the more.

liberal mainline one? Am I hearing this right? Yes, and that's kind of why I'm doing the Reconquista, because all the mainline denominations are liberalized to the same extent that the ELCA, the evangelical Lutheran Church is. You just think they can be fixed? Yes, because Athanasius didn't split off voluntarily and start Athanasius' free Bible church in the desert when the majority of the church was hijacked by heretics in the 300s. Now let me start off this section with a quotation from scripture. In 2 Corinthians 6, Paul says, do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness, or what fellowship has light with darkness, what accord has Christ with Belial, or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?

What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of God, as God has said. Then he's quoting from an Old Testament passage, and you can see in verse 17 there, the words, go out from their mist and be separate from them, touch no unclean thing. Basically, what I want to make an appeal for here is that there is a time for separation from apostasy. For there is a time where a willful separation from an institutionally established church is pleasing to God. Now, we'll need to explain this, and I'll need to work through this. This gets really complicated because even that word institutional. I'm thinking here of institutions that accrue over time throughout church history and do not have a direct divine sanction.

Okay. For example, the mainline denominations. Jesus Christ never said in the Bible, thou shalt always attend a mainline church or something like that. So this is an institution that accrues over time. It has greater institutional backing, but it's not as though it has direct divine sanction or something like that. And basically, while I would grant that some Christians separate too quickly, and here's the deal, I'm often pushing in the direction of triage. I mean, you know, this, I find this is needed a lot in the world right now. I am always talking about triage. I do a video on annihilationism and a big portion of this spent trying to say, hey, let's rank this. I think Christians often divide too much, separate too much. I expect

Redeem Zumer and I will have a lot of points of agreement. I really like the guy. I consider him a friend in a way. There's lots of people I almost feel like I'm friends with even if I've never met him in real life, because I just like him. God bless him, you know. I'm not against him and his larger aims of wanting to bring mainline churches back to orthodoxy. The concerns are with the judgment against the evangelicals, the judgments, and then the concerns are here with the basic, the idea that you'll often give from him that it's cowardice to separate. And I basically want to say, as much as I'm often pushing in the direction of triage, and, you know, getting along amidst differences, there is a time to separate. And I just want to make a real quick case for that,

and then we'll talk this through in person more in our dialogue. But since he mentioned, mention the Aryan controversy, let's go right there. It is absolutely the case that the Nicene Christians and the Aryans separated from one another and did not fellowship and worship together, particularly in those years between 325 and 381, Ecumenical Council number one and number two. So, for example, in the 370s, when the Aryans take over huge sections of the church, the Nicene Christians in Antioch didn't just keep going to church with the Ariens. They separated. They withdrew. They went outside the city and worshipped in fields surrounding the city that were typically used for military purposes. They had no beautiful buildings.

They had no institutional power. But they understood that when the institution over you says Jesus Christ was created, that's a time to separate. You have to draw the line not as an act of cowardice, but as an act to be faithful to God. Basically, the appeal here can be put really, really simply, obey God rather than men. And this is the appeal made by Afrahat, the fourth-century Persian hermit, not to be confused with the earlier Syriac-Offrahat, where this is one of the Christians who's assisting with the pastoral oversight of the Nicene Christians in Antioch, since Meletius, the patriarch of Antioch had been banished. And when he's headed off hurrying to the fields, Afrahat is accosted by the emperor,

who's more Aryan. And this is what he's reported to have said. lived retired so long as the flock of the heavenly shepherd enjoyed peace, but now I see it torn to pieces. How can I sit quiet in my cell? Were I a virgin confined in my father's house and should see it take fire? Would you advise me to sit still and let the house be burned, in which I should also perish, or leave my room to run and procure help, carry water, and exert my utmost endeavors to put out the fire. Now, I know, in his heart, Redeem Zumer wants to put out the fire too. He wants to help, right? But the point that I'm making from drawing from this is that Offerhat did not consider it to be somehow a compromise or cowardice to go off in the fields and worship out there, separate from the institutional established Aryan churches that are now have taken over. And by the way, this anecdote is from Albin Butler's Lives of the Saints, which is an 18th century text that's a bit hagiographical.

But it's enough to establish the point right now that Nicene Christians did. withdraw. Now let me give a theological case from this from Francis Turriton, who's a the theologian in the reform tradition that both Redeem Zuma and I would draw our identity to, in some respects. Turriton references this episode with Afrahati, doesn't quote the whole passage there. I had to go elsewhere to find it. But he quotes a lot of examples like this from church history to make the point that in his terms, quote, every secession is not evil and schismatical, but only that which is made rashly and unjustly. Put that in modern-day parlance, there's a time to withdraw. There's a time to separate. And he uses lots of metaphors for this. He talks about, you know, I'll put one up on the

screen. If the dad is not feeding the kids, then you have to basically oppose the dad and get the kids food, and he gives lots of metaphors like this that are drawing to the common sense of this position. But the point for it all is this, listen to what he says. The believer is bound to obey the rulers of the church only as long as they obey God and preach his pure and entire word. But when they forsake the truth and rise up against God, the supreme ruler, he would be a rebel against God who would follow them. He would be injurious to God and to himself and his neighbor who should follow the airing and not withdraw from them. Note the word, I'll leave this up for a second. Note the word withdraw there, the third to last word. That's what he's saying you have to do. And the basic rationale is

simple. It's kind of like Peter and John before the Jewish ruling council, a very powerful institution in Acts chapter four when they're saying we must obey God rather than men. I think that Redeemed Zumer would agree in principle with some of this. I think, you know, that's where it'll be fun for us to talk that through and see where we actually do disagree. Because I knew he'll agree that we should obey God rather than men. And I think he would probably say something like, I don't know, we'll see, we'll get into it. It'll probably say, yeah, but you can sort of stay within the mainline traditions and kind of try to fight for that within that context or something like that. And, you know, where I would just disagree is I would say there is a time to separate

from those particular institutions which do not have a direct divine sanction in the spirit of following the principle from Turriton here, in the spirit of the Antiochian Nicene Christians going off to the field. You separate, you withdraw to obey God rather than man. There's a place for that. And basically, I would say, any form of institutional succession that doesn't have a way. have divine warrant behind it. We shouldn't yoke the conscience to, and it's not cowardice to withdraw from those when they are the entity causing the fire rather than putting the fire out,

to use another one of the metaphors here. So hopefully that makes sense. Now here's where, you know, in this discussion, I think those of us who are evangelicals and who feel a loyalty to the evangelical traditions throughout church history, even going back to someone to use that term to describe like the Waldensians and so forth, I think here's where we really need to, you know, to humble ourselves and listen is that we have done this way too much. We have separated too often. We have, this is why I'm always talking about triage. I think we are prone to squabble and rend and divide way too much. But I'm just saying right now, I don't think the answer is you have to stay in the main lines. There is a time. I mean, there are some churches that have gone so off

the rails doctrinally and morally and in other ways that it is a second Corinthians sixth moment where you have to say, what fellowship hath light and darkness? And that's okay because it's a matter of obeying God rather than man. You're not at that point withdrawing from the church, because that one particular instantiation of the church does not exhaust the fullness of Christ's church. Even in the 300s at every moment, this is what the reformers were saying. God always preserves a remnant. And you should never think like Elijah, oh, it's only me or something like that. No, God is always preserving his people in various ways. Oh, boy, there's so much more. talk about about all this. The last thing I'll say is, as we have these conversations, I want to,

I guess, reiterate the need for the gospel and the love of Christ to flow out into our discussion of ecclesiology. And so I was thinking about this passage in Revelation 3, where Jesus doesn't say to the church in Laodicea, you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked, how pathetic? Rather, he said, you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked, I counsel you, and then he's basically saying, I'm going to help you. I'm going to get you close. I'm going to help you see, and so on and so forth. And I think when we have disagreements in the body of Christ, sometimes there is a spirit of contempt. I don't sense that at all from, I've not gotten

that sense from Richard. I'm not accusing him of that. I don't feel that in my heart. I hope I'm not that way. But I think when I put out that first video about low church, you see people talking, sharing their stories in the comments. And you see the low church people saying, yeah, the high church people do act like we're basically second-rate Christians. And you see the high church people saying, yeah, I had this experience at this, you know, low church context where they basically acted like all these other traditions are just Antichrist and so on and so forth. And so the concluding reminder to remember in all of this is let's bring the healing love of Jesus Christ into our ecclesial differences and try to learn from each other and try to say, even where you

think another sector of Christendom is poor, pitiable, blind, naked, et cetera, don't mock them, don't have contempt for them, be like Christ, and say, I want to help them, I love them, I will give my life for them. That's what Jesus would do. So even where you have the most strong concerns, the attitude that is appropriate to there isn't to just look down. I mean, what does that accomplish? Rather, we want to bring the healing love of Christ to that. So I hope these comments are useful to folks following along with all this, and I look forward to talking more with Redeemed Zumer. I apologize if I misunderstood him, misrepresented him in any way, but the good news is we'll have a chance to talk that through, and I'll be listening carefully in that dialogue,

because I like him a lot, and he's a good brother. All right, thanks for watching, everybody, and stay tuned for more.