Henry David Thoreau was an eccentric 19th century American author, philosopher, and naturalist. He spent 2 years, 2 months and 2 days living in a small cabin he built himself outside of Concord, Massachusetts. He chronicles his reflections during that experience in his 1854 book, Walden. He explains the rationale for his exile in the wilderness in the following words.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau commendably wanted to live life to the fullest, to experience its richness at its deepest levels so that when he died, he could die without regret. Eight years after publishing Walden, on May 6, 1862, after a lingering case of tuberculosis, he did die. While on his deathbed, his Aunt Louisa asked him if he had made his peace with God. Thoreau’s response was, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”
Those words, no doubt spoken in sincerity, reflect the kind of willful ignorance that has tragically plagued mankind since our first parents turned away from our Creator. I call it “ignorance” because it reflects a lack of knowledge about the way things actually are.
The Bible teaches us that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 6:23) and that because of sin we are all “by nature children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3), that is the wrath of God. The Apostle Paul says that we are all naturally “enemies of God” (Romans 5:10).
That is undeniably the way that life is now. But it is not the way it was in the beginning. Originally, God made Adam and Eve “upright” (Ecclesiastes 7:29) and enjoyed perfect fellowship with them. Sin caused them to be separated from Him and at odds with Him. Failure to acknowledge that is to be ill-informed. It is ignorance.
Such ignorance is willful because, as Romans 1:18-20 says, “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”
So yes, we all have quarreled with God—including those who, like Thoreau, are willfully ignorant of it. Sin has placed everyone in jeopardy and exposes us all to His wrath. The result is that, left to ourselves we cannot ever have peace with God.
But the good news that is revealed to us in the Bible is that God has not left us to ourselves. On the contrary, in our weakness and helplessness, He has come to us. Through His Son, Jesus Christ, He has provided salvation for us—a way for us to be restored to Him; to have our sin forgiven and to experience genuine peace with God.
Because of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God now reconciles to Himself all who turn from sin and trust in Jesus as Lord.
That truth is what empowered the Apostle Paul to live the way that He did as a minister of Jesus Christ. And that truth is the very foundation of His church throughout the ages. It is what Christians live for; what we stand for. It is the one message that we have that we must declare to men, women, boys and girls today: “in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

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The Chalcedonian Definition of 451 has been the touchstone of orthodox Christology for the past millennium and a half. In this definition was found the resolution to the complex Christological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries. Here, Scripture’s teaching of the hypostatic union was codified for the church: the incarnate Christ is one divine person who subsists in two distinct yet united natures, divine and human. He is not two persons, as the Nestorians taught, but rather “one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son.” Nor does He subsist in only one nature, a divine-human hybrid, as the Monophysites taught, but rather is to be “acknowledged in two natures inconfusedly [and] unchangeably… the difference of the natures being in no way removed because of the union, but rather the properties of each nature being preserved.” One person, two natures. This is the doctrine of the hypostatic union, a cardinal doctrine of the Christian faith.

But as brilliant as the Chalcedonian definition was, it did not answer every question that was to arise in the succeeding decades. In the late sixth and early seventh centuries, a debate arose over whether Christ had one will or two. Sure, He had two natures, one divine and one human. But did that mean He had two wills, one divine and one human? Or, since He was one divine person, did He have just one divine will?

The Monothelite Controversy

This debate has been dubbed “the Monothelite controversy.” Those who taught that Christ had only one divine will were called Monothelites (monos, “one,” thelēma, “will”), and those who taught that He had two wills—one divine and one human—were called Dyothelites (duo, “two,” thelēma, “will”).

The disagreement basically boiled down to whether the faculty of will is a property of a person or a nature. If the faculty of will were a property of a person and not a nature, we would expect Christ, who is one person, to have only one will. But if the faculty of will were a property of a nature and not a person, we would expect Christ, who has two natures, to have two wills. So which is it? Does will belong with person or nature? Does the incarnate Christ have one will or two?

The debate was hashed out in earnest in the events leading up to the Third Council of Constantinople in 680 and 681, when 164 bishops convened to decide the matter. The Monothelite cause was taken up by Macarius I of Antioch, but the majority of the bishops agreed with the writings of Maximus the Confessor of Constantinople (ca. 580–662), a learned monk who argued vociferously for a Dyothelite Christology. The Sixth Ecumenical Council concluded that Christ had to have both a divine will and a human will. Monothelitism was condemned as a heresy leading to Monophysitism, Macarius was deposed, and Dyothelitism was codified as orthodox Christology.

Only a Human Will?

But what was the case against Monothelitism? Well, in the first place, if the incarnate Christ had only one will, which will did He have, and which did He lack? On the one hand, you could argue that part of becoming truly human required the Son to have a human will, and if He could only have one will, then it must have been the divine will that He lacked.

But this raises a number of problems. If Christ, being one person, has only one will, then will must be a property of person rather than nature. This would mean that, from eternity, the Son, being a divine person, had a divine will—up until the incarnation, that is. For when the Word became flesh and took on a human will, He would have had to shed the divine will that He possessed from all eternity. This would be to predicate genuine change in the Second Person of the Trinity, undermining divine immutability. He would have transmuted from (a) a divine person with a divine will to (b) a human person with a human will.

But of course Christ did not become a human person (anhypostasis), as even the Monothelites stipulated. He was a divine person who assumed a human nature into personal union with His divine nature. For this reason, it has not been argued that Christ’s one will was human.

Only a Divine Will?

Well, if the incarnate Christ had only one will, and it wasn’t a human will, it must have been a divine will. This is what the Monothelites argued. The eternal Son was a divine person, and thus had a divine will from all eternity. When He assumed a human nature in the incarnation, He remained a single divine person and thus retained a single divine will. But because (they argued) will is a property of person and not nature, the incarnate Christ did not have a human will.

But does the Bible support that claim? There are at least four reasons to answer in the negative. Monothelite Christology is fatal to Chalcedonian orthodoxy, fatal to the doctrine of the Trinity, fatal to the humanity of Christ, and fatal to the Gospel itself.

Fatal to Chalcedonian Orthodoxy

The first problem with Monothelitism is that it is fatal to Chalcedonian orthodoxy, which is a biblically faithful synthesis of scriptural teaching concerning the person of Christ.

Recall that the crux of this debate is whether the faculty of will is a property of person or nature. If will belongs to person, and Christ is one person, then Christ can have only one will. If will belongs to nature, and Christ has two natures, then Christ must have two wills. Interestingly, Chalcedon weighs in on this question, and in so doing it commends Dyothelitism.

The Definition says that Christ assumed a human nature in order to be “perfect in manhood,” “truly man,” and “consubstantial [i.e., of the same nature] with us according to the manhood.” Then, it defines the human nature Christ assumed by saying He was “of a rational soul and body.” According to Chalcedon, a human nature is a rational soul and body.

But it is virtually universally acknowledged that the will is a faculty of the human soul, alongside the intellect. A rational soul is equipped with (a) a mind that interprets and understands the world and (b) a will that makes choices informed by that understanding. This means that Christ’s human soul is that by which He thinks, understands, and makes choices. The faculty of the will is located in the rational soul, which Chalcedon says was part of that human nature that the Son assumed to be consubstantial with us.

In other words, Chalcedon locates the will in the soul, and it locates the soul in the nature, not the person.[1] Since will is a property of nature, and Christ subsists in two natures, Chalcedon constrains us to a Dyothelite Christology. In Chalcedonian terms, Monothelitism is inherently monophysitic, because one will implies one nature.[2]

Fatal to the Trinity

Second, Monothelitism is fatal to the doctrine of the Trinity. In the first place, it runs afoul of an essential maxim that was universally accepted in early orthodox Trinitarianism: the doctrine of inseparable operations.

Versions of the phrase opera Trinitatis ad extra indivisa sunt (“the external works of the Trinity are undivided/indivisible”), along with its Greek counterpart, appear throughout the writings of such pro-Nicene fathers as Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine. It means that the acts of the Triune God cannot be divided up among the three persons, but that each divine person performs each divine act.[3] Just as God’s nature is indivisible, so also His acts are indivisible.

This reasoning assumes that a person’s nature is the principle by which he acts. Whatever works a person performs, he does so by virtue of the nature in which he subsists. So, Christ sleeps by virtue of His human nature (Matt 8:24; cf. Ps 121:4), but calms the storm by virtue of His divine nature (Matt 8:26; cf. Job 38:8). In other words, the doctrine of inseparable operations is rooted in the notion that a person’s acts—which would include acts of his will—are a function of his nature.

In this way, pro-Nicene trinitarianism locates the will in nature rather than person, consistent with Dyothelitism. But if, as the Monothelites contend, will were a property of person rather than nature, then the external acts of the Trinity could be divided among the three persons, conceived as three separate centers of consciousness with three separate wills. When worked out consistently, the metaphysics of Monothelitism undermines a fundamental staple of orthodox trinitarianism.

If Jesus cannot make the human choice to withstand temptation and choose obedience to His Father, He is not truly human.

Further, Monothelitism strikes at trinitarian unity in another way. In Matthew 26:39, Jesus famously prays that the cup of the Father’s wrath might pass from Him. “Yet,” He says, “not as I will, but as You will.” Though this statement is fraught with mystery, pro-Chalcedonian Christology teaches that this was an instance in which Jesus submitted His human will (which righteously recoiled from an uninhibited sprint into the wrath of God) to the divine will. According to His holy humanity, there is some righteous backwardness that the Son feels when contemplating the punishment of the cross. But such hesitation is quickly remedied by submitting His human will to the divine will (the will shared by Father, Son, and Spirit).

But according to Monothelitism, Jesus had no human will. He must therefore be speaking of subjecting His distinct divine will to the Father’s distinct divine will. Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that these are distinct faculties of willing (by treating will as a property of personhood), could it be even theoretically possible for there to be a distinction in what the divine Son wants and what the divine Father wants? How can it be possible for two divine persons to will contrary to one another? On a Monothelite reading of Matthew 26:39, it seems impossible to avoid positing a fatal disruption between the person of the Father and the person of the Son.

Fatal to the Humanity of Christ

A third problem with Monothelitism is that it is fatal to the genuine humanity of Christ. If Christ didn’t assume a human will in His incarnation, it seems difficult to argue convincingly that Christ was and is truly human. To put it simply, genuine humans make human choices by virtue of their human wills! To be bereft of a human faculty of willing is to be deprived of the capacity to make genuinely human choices. Without that capacity, it would seem that our Savior would be decidedly unlike us in a most significant way.

Specifically, the absence of a distinct human will seems clearly to run afoul of the notion that Jesus endured genuine temptation (e.g., Matt 4:1–11). James 1:13 teaches that God by definition cannot be tempted, and so Jesus could not have been tempted by virtue of anything of His divinity. At the same time, the nature of temptation is a proposal to the will that it should consent to sin. Jesus connects temptation to the will when He counsels His sleeping disciples to pray that they may not enter into temptation, for though their spirit is willing their flesh is weak (Matt 26:41). Temptation is a proposal to the will, and one succumbs to temptation by choosing sin rather than obedience.

Now, if Jesus could not be tempted by virtue of His deity (Jas 1:13), He could only be tempted by virtue of His humanity. But if temptation is a proposal to the will that it should choose sin, then Jesus must have had a human will to which temptation proposed sin. Only in this way could He be our sympathetic high priest “who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4:15).[4]

If Jesus cannot make the human choice to withstand temptation and choose obedience to His Father, He is not truly human. And since temptation is a proposal to the will to choose disobedience, He had to have had a human will. The alternative is fatal to His genuine humanity. To be truly human, Jesus must have a human will.

Fatal to the Gospel

And that is intimately related to the fourth problem with Monothelitism: it is fatal to the Gospel itself, for if Christ was not Himself truly human, He could not be the Mediator between God and men. Apart from Christ’s genuine humanity, the sons of Adam are left to cry with Job, “He is not a man as I am that I may answer Him, that we may go to court together. There is no umpire between us, who may lay his hand upon us both” (Job 9:32–33).

Maximus the Confessor famously argued this point by appealing to another well-known trinitarian maxim from the fourth century, this one from the pen of Gregory of Nazianzus (329–390). In defending the full humanity of Christ against the Apollinarians, who claimed that Christ assumed only a human body but not a human soul, Gregory famously argued, “That which is not assumed is not healed.”

That is to say, Christ is our Savior by His substitutionary saving work. He saves us first of all by taking on a full and true human nature (Phil 2:7), so that He is genuinely “consubstantial with us according to the manhood,” able to stand in man’s place as a genuine man, representing us in every way (1 Tim 2:5). If there were an aspect of humanity that Christ failed to assume to Himself, then that aspect could not be healed by His substitutionary saving work. If Christ was to heal the human will (along with the rest of human nature), he had to have assumed a human will in His incarnation.

Besides, the whole point of the incarnation was that our penalty had to be paid by a true man. Without a human will, Jesus lacks something that is constitutive of our nature, and is thus disqualified from standing in our place.

Still further, our Savior must not only satisfy the penal demands of the law by dying on behalf of sinners. He must also satisfy the positive demands of the law by obeying on behalf of sinners (Matt 3:15; 5:20; Gal 4:4–6). Jesus is the Last Adam (Rom 5:14; 1 Cor 15:45), come to succeed precisely where the first Adam had failed (1 Cor 15:21–22; cf. Luke 4:1–13). His obedience to the law of God would be the substance of the righteousness credited to those who believe (Rom 5:18–19; cf. 4:3–6; 2 Cor 5:21).

But that obedience had to be the obedience of a genuine man. If Christ, the Last Adam, cannot choose—as a man—to walk in obedience to God’s law, precisely in the way the first Adam failed, then He cannotstand in our place as our Substitute and accomplish our justification as our federal head.[5] And He cannot make that choice as a man without a human will. Wellum is right when he says, “It is only by affirming that Christ has a human will that we can do justice to the obedience of the Son as a man which is so foundational to Christ’s work for us.”[6]

A Biblical Doctrine

It’s often said or implied that such a doctrine, while historically well-attested and theologically necessary, lacks textual foundation. But that is not so. Scripture speaks of Jesus’ human will when it speaks of Him willing (θέλω) to do things that are not proper to deity, like moving from one location to another (John 1:43), drinking or not (Matt 27:34), or obeying (Mark 14:12; Phil 2:8). Scripture speaks of Jesus’ divine will, for example, in Matthew 23:37, when He says He often wanted to gather the children of Jerusalem throughout her history of killing her prophets and stoning God’s messengers. He identifies Himself as the patient God who desired (θέλω), long before His incarnation, to deliver His people.

If Christ was to heal the human will, he had to have assumed a human will in His incarnation.

Another example of Christ’s divine will is seen in John 5:21, where Jesus grounds His equality with the Father (5:18) in their inseparable operations (5:19). In verse 21, He says that one of those divine works which He shares with the Father is giving spiritual life—a prerogative of deity—“to whom He wills.”

It is true, as has been shown, that if you deny Dyothelitism, you cannot consistently maintain a Chalcedonian Christology or Nicene Trinitarianism, you undermine the genuine humanity of Christ by suggesting He lacks a human will, and thus you undermine the Gospel which is founded upon representative substitution. But it is also true that Dyothelitism is a biblical doctrine.

Conclusion

Therefore, what at first may seem like an arcane dispute about meaningless doctrinal minutia is revealed to be fundamental to the humanity of our Mediator and thus the ground of all our hope. The Third Council of Constantinople concluded the same and condemned Monothelitism, establishing Dyothelitism as the orthodox teaching of the church. The faculty of will is a property of nature, not person. And since the one man, Christ Jesus, subsists in both divine and human natures, He has two wills: divine and human. It was by virtue of His human will that He made human choices—choices to resist temptation, to obey God’s law in the place of sinners, and to bear the curse of God’s law in the place of those same sinners.

Notably, Dyothelitism also relates quite closely to a contemporary controversy in the evangelical church: the EFS/ERAS debate. Since (a) the Godhead is three persons subsisting in one divine nature, and since (b) will is a property of nature and not person, therefore, (c) there are not three faculties of will in God by virtue of the three persons, but one faculty of will in God by virtue of the one divine nature.

Consubstantial with one another, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exercise volitions by virtue of the identical faculty of willing. Since the single divine will cannot be “subjected” or “subordinated” to itself, there can be no eternal functional subordination or eternal relations of authority and submission within the Trinity.

[1] Interestingly, Wellum notes, “In the Patristic era, the word-flesh Christologies of Arius, Apollinarius, et al., also identified ‘person’ with ‘soul,’ ‘will,’ ‘mind,’ which orthodoxy rejected” (God the Son Incarnate, 338n101). If Chalcedon located will in the nature, while Arius and Apollinarius located will in the person, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that locating the will in the person is heretical.

[2] Besides this, I’d argue that most Christians implicitly know that will is a property of nature and not person. When we engage in the debate over the bondage and freedom of the will and man’s depravity, we explain the reality that, apart from regenerating grace, though man’s will is free to make choices, it is not free not to choose rightly. Man is not an automaton unable to choose between alternatives, but he is depraved, unable to choose righteousness. He has a will, but his will is bound to act in accordance with his nature.

[3] For example, the Father creates (1 Cor 8:6), the Son creates (Col 1:16), and the Spirit creates (Gen 1:2; Ps 33:6), but there is only one act of creating and thus only one cosmos created.

[4] Note, this is not to suggest either (a) that Jesus was peccable (He was not, John 5:19), or (b) that Jesus was tempted internally (He was only tempted externally, John 14:30; cf. Matt 4:1–11; Jas 1:14).

[5] Wellum, God the Son Incarnate, 348.

[6] Ibid., 346–47, emphasis original.

This speech was given by Megan Basham at the 2024 SBC Event: SBC at a Crossroads, hosted by Founders Ministries and the Center for Baptist Leadership.

So I’d like you all to imagine for a moment. You’ve just started a new job and on your first day your supervisor tells you that at 2 pm every afternoon the entire company pauses to “carve out time for their spirits. To “connect with their divine source.” And to “honor the sacred world.”

As a Christian, this New Age jargon sets off alarm bells in your mind. But you decide to keep your reservations to yourself. (You don’t want to look like a fundamentalist!) Then your boss leads you to an all-white room he calls a “communal space” where he rings a “sacred meditation bell” three times.

A “spiritual engagement coordinator” steps forward, lights incense and invites you, along with the rest of the staff, to sit in the lotus position and close your eyes. He then tells you that he is going to lead you through a 20-minute “sacred pause” designed to deepen your relationship with yourself. He tells you this “sacred” meditation with yourself (he really likes the word sacred) is being done to the benefit of all beings everywhere.

This little eastern mysticism scenario is not imaginary. This is the daily practice of The Fetzer Institute, a leftwing foundation who says its mission is to “build the spiritual foundation” of our world.

If it weren’t clear enough that Fetzer’s method for building that spiritual foundation is nothing like the Bible’s, another way it does so is by giving money to groups like the National LGBTQ Task Force. 

Who else does it give money to? The ERLC.

In 2018, Fetzer gave the ERLC more than $346,000 to “collaborate” on research that would identify the “rhetorical framing” evangelicals use when it comes to democracy. That is, how we talk about politics. And it was then to share the insights from that political research with the ERLC’s national conference and with “churches under the Southern Baptist Convention.”

The following year, in 2019, Fetzer gave the ERLC another $200,000 to, among other things, conduct seminars on “how American evangelicals might contribute to healing political divides.”

In other words, Fetzer bought access to Southern Baptist conferences and churches through the ERLC in the form of an explicitly political project. And the ERLC earned its pay.

The research Fetzer bankrolled has been disseminated and promoted in ERLC material and at ERLC events. In one such document, the ERLC recommends we learn how to engage in civil political discourse from a fellow recipient of Fetzer funds–Cherie Harder, President of Trinity Forum and a prominent Never Trump voice.

At a February 2024 conference for a Never Trump Political Action Committee, she called the former President a “frankly evil and nihilistic leader.” She has never used such rhetoric to describe Biden, the most pro-abortion, pro-perversion, and anti-family president this nation has ever known.

Yet this is who the ERLC (and Fetzer) hold out as our model for civil, Christian discourse.

When we look at Fetzer’s political stances like its “unequivocal support of the LGBTQ community,” it’s clear that when they say they want evangelicals to “heal our political divides” what they mean is that they want Christians to soften their public positions on issues like marriage and sexuality.

According to Fetzer, Christians who are confident in our convictions harm democracy. Nor is Fetzer the only leftwing foundation that has managed to tie some purse-strings tothe ERLC.

The Democracy Fund was founded by Buddhist billionaire Pierre Omidyar. You might recognize him as the man who gave the world Ebay. His foundation gives grants to groups like Red Canary Song, which describes itself as a “grassroots collective of Asian & migrant sex workers.”

When Roe v Wade was overturned, the Democracy Fund put out a statement. It said the Dobbs decision proved “how vulnerable our political system is to perversion by leaders who are not committed to protecting and strengthening our democracy.”

Let me say that again—according to the Democracy Fund, protecting and strengthening our democracy means protecting and strengthening abortion.

In 2018, when the Democracy Fund was looking for evangelical leaders to help foster more “constructive politics” in the U.S., it, too, turned to the ERLC.The purpose of the $100,000 grant it gave them was to pursue “long-term action” against America’s alleged white supremacy problem.

The ERLC took it for granted that the Southern Baptists it is supposed to represent would agree that one of America’s most pressing problems is white supremacy.

It’s worth noting that independent journalist Glenn Greenwald, a liberal, was once a beneficiary of Omidyar himself. Omidyar bankrolled his left-leaning news outlet, The

Intercept. But Greenwald was forced to quit the company he co-founded when it wouldn’t let him publish stories critical of Joe Biden. Greenwald said this of Omidyar: “Liberal billionaires will only fund groups that advance liberal causes.”

So what cause did Omidyar want to advance through the ERLC?

Another liberal billionaire who has taken an interest in the ERLC–Mark Zuckerberg. In 2020, the Facebook founder spent over $400 million dollars turning out the vote in heavily Democratic areas in swing states. According to reporting in the New York Post, he did this by “funding a targeted, private takeover of government election operations through…nonprofit organizations.”

That same year, his foundation also gave the ERLC a $90,000 grant for an unspecified criminal justice reform project. How was the money used? We don’t know. The SBC lacks financial transparency and the ERLC has not disclosed this information. And the ERLC staffer who procured the grant left a short time later to join the Biden Campaign.

I didn’t set out to write a book about the SBC. And despite the rumors, I did not write a book about the SBC. But the SBC does loom large in my new book. And that’s because the SBC looms large in the minds of the people I did set out to write about—the powerful progressive influences in the church. And I’m not just talking about the ministry leaders bringing in racial hiring quotas, female pastors, and pronoun hospitality.

I’m talking about leftwing billionaires and organizations who, in their long march through the institutions, have now set their sights on the Church. And too many leaders within the church are proving only too happy to help them.

When we see the secular foundations the ERLC is partnering with—those who work to see abortion, legal prostitution, every sort of LGBT perversion protected and promoted in our law, Southern Baptists should echo 2 Corinthians 6:14 and ask—what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? What fellowship has light with darkness?”

The ERLC was created to represent the interests of Southern Baptists to the secular political world. Instead, it is now taking money to represent the interests of the secular political world to Southern Baptists. Which must prompt us to wonder, just who does it see as its mission field?

Know this, it is not a coincidence that these leftwing influencers decided to work with the ERLC. They have been specifically strategizing about how to co-opt Southern Baptists for years.

Yes, they are talking about the SBC and its entities by name. And not just the ERLC.

In 2015, the George Soros- and Bill Gates-funded think tank, New America, released a report on efforts to pass climate change legislation.

The report noted that the strategy of the environmentalists was to recruit “elite evangelicals” who would then use their influence to give spiritual legitimacy to specific climate change policies. Their hope was that this advocacy for fossil fuel legislation would “trickle down” to ordinary Christians in the pews.

That is, the climate change activists wanted to use evangelical leaders in trusted organizations who know the lingo to persuasively sell a message to what would otherwise be an unreceptive audience. New America explained that the object is to “collect strange bedfellows” and “sort of sneakily break down” the faith coalition from the inside and “give cover to Republican members of Congress to support climate action.”

“Because” they wrote, “even just neutralizing the Southern Baptist Convention” could “disrupt the solid Republican opposition to measures like cap and trade.”

In the nine years since that report, the climate change activists have had significant success in convincing SBC institutions to take up their cause.

Southeastern Seminary, for example, has been particularly active in promoting climate change alarmism to its students.

Just one example of many, in 2022, it welcomed Jonathan Moo, Environmental Studiesprofessor, to give a guest lecture titled, “How to love our neighbor in the midst of the climate crisis.”

In it, Moo claimed that environmental activism is a necessary part of being “faithful to the Gospel.” He said the United States bears the lion’s share of guilt because of how “rich and prosperous” our use of fossil fuels has made us. And he told the students Americans are especially obligated to “sacrifice” by adopting emission-restricting policies.

The kinds of policies that are making everything from gas to groceries more expensive, not just for us, but also for those neighbors we’re supposed to be loving.

If Moo adding new environmental requirements to the Gospel weren’t shocking enough, he also suggested the students purchase indulgences for climate sins like traveling by airplane. In particular, he suggested they buy carbon credits from the environmentalist group A Rocha. On whose board Moo just so happens to sit.

Now A Rocha probably isn’t a familiar name to most of you. So I’ll tell you a little bit about it. Though it brands itself as a Christian ministry, it gets much of its funding from secular groups like the Annenberg Foundation, which also funds the National Abortion Rights Action League, Planned Parenthood, and the Center for Reproductive Rights.

As with many other major secular foundations, Annenberg’s interest in environmentalism is married to a desire to reduce the population through abortion.

And A Rocha’s leadership isn’t especially bothered by that goal. Its executive director, Ben Lowe, ran for Congress as a Democrat, assuring voters that despite claiming to be personally pro-life he would not support overturning Roe v. Wade. In other words, he took the same position Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi have.

Then there are A Rocha’s strange hymns and prayers that sound more like Marxist Gaia worship (or something you’d hear at the Fetzer institute) than anything recognizably biblical.

Among the sins A Rocha calls humanity to repent from in its recommended prayers are “ecological violence” and humanity “act[ing] like parasites.” It suggests praying for the “courage to speak out against increased nuclear capability” and lamenting America’s “exploitive economic system.”

Listen to part of this prayer it published for distribution to churches and ask yourself whether you could imagine your congregation praying this together on a Sunday morning. It’s titled “Woe to the Unholy Trinity.”

…We have acted as cheerleaders and chaplains to the unholy trinity…

And so we name the unholy beast.

We renounce it.

We repent of it.

Unrestrained Capitalism,

Consumerism,

Individualism . . .

This unholy trinity

That oppresses the poor,

Ransacks the Earth.

One has to wonder what average Southern Baptists would have thought had they known their “unholy” capitalist tithes, which help support Southeastern Seminary, were going to pay the lecture fees of a representative from A Rocha. Who then used that invite to do a bit of capitalist carbon trading himself.

While researching the multiple guest lectures and conferences Southeastern has dedicated to the subject of climate change, I never found a single speaker who challenged the progressive position that it is an existential crisis. Yet there is legitimate evidence for skepticism about this claim. And reputable evangelical organizations whose members include NASA climate scientists would be only too happy to explain to an audience of seminary students just what that evidence is.

Yet for some reason, Southeastern Seminary students have never heard from those NASA climate scientists.

Is the degree to which humans are impacting the climate an issue on which Christians of good faith can disagree? Of course. The problem is demanding consensus on the subject by abusing and manipulating scripture. The problem is an SBC seminary, whose ostensible mission is educating students on the full breadth of Christian thought, promoting only one view. And it just so happens to be the view that aligns with nearly every major corporation, A-list Hollywood, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, and the most powerful progressive foundations on the planet.

Then it seems less like debating debatable issues and more like turning our temples over to the environmentalist moneychangers.

But alarming as it is that these powerful secular left institutions have managed to harness the SBC for their purposes, it is even more disturbing that some of our leaders are covering their tracks for them.

Perhaps some of you will remember in 2020 when Baptist Press published an explainer claiming that “not a penny” of Soros money has ever gone to the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT), which is a side project of the secular progressive group, the National Immigration Forum. The EIT is not, as you might suppose from the name, a group that preaches the gospel to or provides for the material needs of immigrants. No, it is a political coalition that includes the ERLC, JD Greear, Kevin Ezell, and Danny Akin, to name just a few of the SBC leaders involved. Through lobbying legislators and distributing material to churches and ministries it promotes amnesty policies for illegal immigrants.

In 2016, the internal board books for Soros’ foundation, Open Society, leaked. They revealed that it had given $200,000 to a program the EIT was a part of, known as Bibles, Badges, and Business. The report also noted future plans to divide an additional million between that program and another initiative because, Open Society said, “evangelical support [has been] highly influential in engaging conservative lawmakers.”

The 2016 Soros board book also said this:

“In the course of our work, we were able to generate engagement by some conservative voices such as evangelical Christians and Southern Baptists through grantee National Immigration Forum.”

Which, again, is the umbrella organization over the Evangelical Immigration Table.

As ERLC trustee Jon Whitehead, a Harvard trained attorney by the way, told me after he reviewed these documents, “Southern Baptists were shamelessly hung out for sale by these leaders. In exchange for subsidized meetings with their EIT friends, they looked the other way as their churches and pews were exploited. They even used Baptist Press to mislead people, claiming ‘not a penny’ of Soros money went toward EIT. It looks more like tens of millions of pennies!”

If we give Baptist Press the benefit of the doubt, they were negligently mistaken. The only other alternative is that they were lying.

And Soros’ Open Society is only one of the hard left NGOs that has supported the EIT. The Ford, Rockefeller, and Tides foundations–all groups that also support abortion, the LGBT agenda, and a host of other anti-biblical goals—have contributed over a million dollars to the EIT’s project to mobilize evangelical support for open borders policies.

The secular left powerbrokers see American Christians as a captive audience. Maybe the last captive audience they have not conquered. Their desire is to have SBC churches and ministries for their political projects, and we have leaders who are more than willing to give them that access.

As the largest Protestant association in the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention is uniquely positioned to influence the U.S. toward godliness. In an era in which almost the whole of our mainstream culture has been engulfed by confusion and darkness, we should stand out all the more for our willingness to cut against the cultural grain.

Instead, so many of our SBC leaders warn that to look different from our neighbors—by, say, rejecting feminist demands to open the pastorate to women—will damage our witness. (As if God didn’t know what would be “damaging” to His Church when He laid down his proscription against women pastors.)

According to the latest religion statistics, just over 5 percent of U.S. adults are Southern Baptists. That’s nearly 13 million Americans. Coincidentally, that’s almost the exact same number of American adults who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender.

Through their tremendous commitment to their cause, they have transformed America from the steps of the White House to the smallest local library. No corner of this country has not been touched by their influence.

Why can’t we say the same?

Can you imagine the transformation we might see in this nation if the whole of the SBC had the same courage of its convictions that the LGBT movement has?

If Southern Baptists uniformly demanded that their pastors, professors, seminary administrators, and national leaders stayed passionately focused on the cause of Christ and His Word, rather than taking up the preoccupations of billionaires, businesses, and lawmakers, it would be enough to see a new Reformation in the American Church.

We have a choice, we will either fulfill our commission to be salt and light, which starts with choosing biblical distinctiveness and holding our leaders accountable for what they do in our name. Or we will continue diluting our mission with the world’s priorities until we disappear into the crowd entirely.

Order Megan’s book: Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda