Whew. I'd heard *about* Piper's letter against Jonathon Bowers after Johnathon's resignation. But today is the first time I've read the letter. It speaks for itself.

And yet...

I want to underline some things I notice from Piper's response. 🧵 First of all, as I was explaining to someone the other day: Bethlehem has a "weird" way of talking about things, its own brand of Christianese that it inherited from Piper. The professors and people at Bethlehem are some of the smartest people I've ever met, in terms of IQ.

Knowing many of the stories behind this article (and having my own stories of spiritual abuse at Bethlehem as well), I am very disappointed with how the stories of abuse were treated in this piece. And I’m not the only one 👇🏼

https://twitter.com/kateshellnutt/status/1428750273317675011

Ann was quoted in the article. Here’s her thoughts on the piece:

https://twitter.com/MekalaAnn/status/1428785082098147333

How could a professor's lack of emotional intelligence result in suppression and trauma for students in the academic arena? What happens if a whole institution shares this lack of EQ?

Another 🧵 from my experience at @BCS_MN. A case study in two Scenes, with some screenshots. Scene 1: In April 2020, I turned in what was essentially my capstone paper for seminary. The prompt for the paper was to answer the question, "What does the whole Bible say about _______?" And the fill-in-the-blank could be something related to ecclesiology, i.e., the church.

I’ve thought for awhile now that John 9 is a key text for survivors of abuse that occurred in a Christian, or religious, context. There’s insight and there’s encouragement here in this mind-blowing chapter of John’s Gospel.🧵 Jesus performs a miracle—giving sight to a blind man—in verses 1-7, then from verses 8-34, Jesus is conspicuously absent.

In Jesus’s absence, a war of narratives emerges between Pharisees and the blind man:

Either we have a brazen sheep,
or we have blind shepherds.

I hear a critic in my head.

He says: If I have so many negative things to say about BCS, why did I go there in the first place? If I don’t like John Piper’s theology, why did I sit under it for four years?

The short answer is that going into seminary I was incredibly naive. 🧵 As a teenager, I found myself wanting more out of God, frankly. The G/god that I’d encountered in my church was authoritarian and tribal. And that left a vacuum in my soul. Then I discovered Piper’s sermons, etc., and I was immediately drawn to the “bigness” of Piper’s vision.

In case we’re tempted to think that the “empathy is sin” mindset is a fringe thing for evangelicals, let me connect some dots based on my experience.

I’ve got the names of an individual and an institution for us. John Piper, and Bethlehem College & Seminary. 1/ Let’s start with the institution. I attended @BCS_MN’s M.Div program from 2016-2020. In 2019, yes, I heard BCS’s president-elect Joe Rigney say that “empathy is sin.” But I also heard the same thing from at least one other BCS prof on several occasions, with *no* qualifiers. 2/

Man. The memories from my four years in seminary at BCS keep trickling back.

On #InternationalWomensDay, let me share this memory with you, as a kind of apology to the women (especially pastor’s wives) who have been taken for granted.

TW: Christian patriarchy. In one of the later years of my M.Div program at BCS, I took a “Biblical Eldership” class. It wasn’t a hard class, but it did have a rather demanding requirement: that we all attend the Spring “Weekender” retreat at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C. together.

Here are my recent threads re: my experience of the toxicity at Bethlehem College & Seminary. Forgive my typos. Thanks, friends. 🙏🏼 Part 1a: In which I disclose that I listened to “A Church Called Tov” and was finally able to connect the dots regarding my seminary experiences:

threadreaderapp.com/thread/1322434…

I’ve said several things about @BCS_MN recently on Twitter. And yet, I still have so many memories and thoughts. And I’m still processing through some of the hurt.

In one thread, I claimed that BCS has a toxic, “power through fear” culture. 1/ In another, I claimed that the faculty/admins were complicit in this culture (i.e., the problem isn’t an individual; it’s the institution). In this thread, I want to give substance to those claims. 2/

It’s your weekly sermon-prep live tweet from yours truly! Working through Mt 1-4 leading up to Palm Sun. Mt 2:1-23 this week.

Last wk we summed up the chiasmic 1:1-25 with “Jesus is the King we’ve all been waiting for.”

(Disclaimer: no chiasms in 2:1-23 that I can discern. 🤷🏻‍♂️) The main point of 2:1-23 will be “God is getting ready to launch his kingdom through King Jesus.”

Outline?

We see God
1. Proclaim his King (v. 1-12)
2. Protect his King (v. 13-18)
3. Preserve his King (v. 19-24)

Anyone have a better p-word than “preserve” for v. 19-24? 😂

I always used to stumble over passages in the Psalms that talked about “enemies” or “foes.” For example, I didn’t know what to do when David says something like “God, consider how many are my foes, and with what violent hatred they hate me” in Psalm 25:19. 1/ Those texts (and let’s be honest, there’s a lot of them in the Psalter) just never seemed to apply to me. David literally has soldiers and enemies chasing him over mountains and into caves, to kill him! I don’t have anything remotely close to that, I would always think. 2/

I’ve been thinking. A few people at least have accused me of slandering @BCS_MN via Twitter. So here are some thoughts re: claims of “slander,” and re: a thoroughly inadequate institutional response on the part of BCS over the past years. 1/ Overall I had a terrible experience over four years at BCS. It climaxed in April 2020 in a confrontation with a prof in a Zoom classroom, in front of my cohort. At the end of this confrontation (which I had tried to de-escalate, and which my prof had insisted on escalating), 2/

So far this culture of silence and “loyalty” at BCS has stifled anything resembling scandal. But the school cannot suppress its toxicity forever. @reachjulieroys, watch for something ugly to break open at Bethlehem College & Seminary in the coming years. More could be said. But I may have said enough here to later get threatened with a lawsuit myself! The bottom line is, stay far away from @BCS_MN. Thank you @KyleJamesHoward for speaking up about BCS. And thank you @scotmcknight and @laurambarringer for writing this book.

I just finished an audiobook of “A Church Called Tov” by @scotmcknight and @laurambarringer. Almost all I could think about was my seminary experience @BCS_MN. Speaking as an alumni, I would not recommend Bethlehem College & Seminary to *anyone.* Buckle up. I’ll tell you why. I knew instinctively that I had spent four years in a toxic Christian culture. But this book gave me a framework and vocabulary to describe why it felt toxic.