Hello and welcome to the Conversations that Matter Podcast. My name is John Harris.

Today I want to talk about presentism.

Presentism. What do we do with men like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield?

Men who have been respected in evangelical reformed, conservative circles for years and

now their status is being called into question because they own slaves.

They did not hold to egalitarian ideas our current culture takes for granted.

Do we cast them aside?

Do we stop respecting them? Do we call them hypocrites? Do we still learn from them?

I think we're going to need to ponder this in the Christian community because if you have not

Face this challenge you will trust me you will

In fact if you're not even a Christian if you're just an American or someone who values your Western civilization,

you're going to need to think through this too because all of these things are under attack right now.

Now I think we are in the middle of what I'm calling a post-modernist

controversy. I want to get all my cards out on the table first before we get

into Edwards and Whitfield. I want to tell you what this means first,

because I think it's important.

The Modernist controversy happened about 100 years ago

and disciplines like E, higher criticism and literature,

these seeped into evangelical institutions, places of higher learning, and the

fundamentalists who formed during this time the

conservatives they said you're ushering in a new higher authority we believe

scriptures the higher authority revelation is the high authority that we believe in the higher authority. Revelation is the high authority that we believe in.

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