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Trey Ferguson Profile picture
Trey Ferguson
@PastorTrey05
Jesus, justice, & jokes. Lovin, theologizin & Black Power nappin. Not as outlandish as I could be. @3BlackMen. Author of 𝑻𝒉𝒆𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒊𝒛𝒊𝒏’ 𝑩𝒊𝒈𝒈𝒆𝒓.
Chris Bugbee Profile picture Mark Profile picture 2 subscribed
Apr 15 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
You know what? We gon use this as a teaching opportunity.

Time for a #LetsGetBetterAtReadingTheBible 🧵

The Bible repeatedly frowns upon angels/“sons of God”/“strange/foreign flesh” having sexual relations with actual human beings.

1/13 The first time we see this pop up is Genesis 6. There’s people everywhere. (6:1)

And the sons of God are like “…I like how that look. Ima get me some human action.” (6:2)

They made babies. (6:4)

God is like “hell naw. Restart the phone. Put it in some rice.” (6:7) 2/13
Mar 26 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Look… is Lee Greenwood releasing a “God Bless the USA Bible” something I could potentially get behind in the right circumstances?

No.

But is “God Bless the USA” a dope song?

Also no. Y’all want a song that actually captures the aspirational essence of America?

I can even give you one sung by white people with a good ol bluegrass feel to it.

It’s “Can You Run” by The SteelDrivers, featuring none other than Chris Stapleton.
Mar 22 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Whether or not babies are sinners is a theological issue pondered by people who are not facing real issues and tangible sin.

If the people telling you that you were born in sin also own & traffic people who look like you, you not worried about sinner babies no more. I fully affirm the idea that babies are born *in sin*. But they literally can’t do anything. They’re not active participants of the thing they’re born in.

Callin babies sinners is stupid.

And it’s kinda stupid to spend real time thinkin bout it. GO FEED THAT BABY!
Mar 21 • 18 tweets • 3 min read
This is an area of legit fascination for me, and I do have thoughts. Pull up a chair if you bout that life.

Here’s the “too long; didn’t read”: Black culture is America’s first indigenous non-agrarian export.

🧵 1/18 America (as we perceive of it), being a colonial project, did not have much of a positive identity of its own. They were *against* plenty of stuff (a negative identity). But not *for* anything particularly original.

They were mostly just lightly estranged Europeans. 2/18
Feb 25 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
…y’all ever seen that clip of Brian Scalabrine givin casual YMCA-pickup type hoopers BUCKETS?

It’s a funny experiment on whether or not an amateur hooper could beat someone who many think is a bad/unremarkable professional player. 1/9

youtube.com/shorts/CylXSCj… Many of the people reading this don’t know who Brian Scalabrine is without Google.

But he was a professional basketball player.

Averaged 3 points a game for his career.

Not thought of as a great NBA player.

But he was *still* a PROFESSIONAL basketball player. 2/9
Feb 16 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Aight, I’m waitin on the Comcast dude to finish installing the equipment in the office, so let’s have a conversation about “the wrath of God” and how penal substitution makes a mockery of it.

First things first: the wrath of God is real, and to be taken seriously. 1/8 HOWEVER!

The idea that the wrath of God is satiated by blood sacrifice (much less HUMAN sacrifice, which is patently against the testimony of God in the Hebrew Bible) is not soundly supported by the biblical texts.

Some dudes made that up centuries after the crucifixion. 2/8
Feb 15 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
Aight. #LetsGetBetterAtReadingTheBible

Whenever I talk about how penal substitutionary atonement misrepresents the character of God—because no “good” god would torture an innocent person to death to satiate their wrath—someone brings up Isaiah 53 like that’s gon stump me. 1/15 Firstly, I want y’all free of the addiction to prooftexting everybody to death by mercilessly ripping pieces of scripture from their context in order to support the presuppositions 16th century theologians told you to bring to the text.

But back to Isaiah 53… 2/15
Jan 23 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Every time I talk about how penal substitutionary atonement is awful, someone reaches out to tell me they didn’t even know there were other options, and I get to preach the gospel all over again! 🙌🏾

So here goes: 1/3 “Why did Jesus have to die?”

Because in faithfully loving humanity and being committed to their wholeness, he was received with hostility.

And in that fact, we find the extent of the sin of the world.

The way of the world would torture and execute God in the flesh. BUT… 2/3
Jan 20 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
Aight… I’ll answer these questions in short up top, and then it’s time for us to have a bit of a conversation about “risking nuance” and the *performance* of safety.

The answers are “sure, I guess,” and “not really.”

Now… about that conversation: 1/22 Image I was raised in and ordained in church traditions that are not out & out “affirming.”

I entered adolescence and adulthood believing gay people should have the right to marry, and I maintain the same.

I’ve travelled in communities where some people agree & some do not. 2/22
Jan 19 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
If your child is queer… and they have a big ol gay wedding… don’t use the Bible as an excuse to skip.

There are no wedding ceremonies recorded in the Bible.

Banquets? Consummations? Yes.

You can blame the Bible for skipping those.

Otherwise, just tell em you don’t like em. A lot of people are not being entirely accurate with what the Bible says about marriage.

“The Bible defines marriage as between one man and one woman.”

Well… no, actually. It doesn’t.

Sure, I’ll spot you a man and a woman.

But it doesn’t specify the number.
Jan 13 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Many arguments about abortion (often wrongly, in my opinion) center unwanted pregnancies.

But the thing about that is… literally every single unwanted pregnancy is cause by a male climaxing.

That sounds obvious, but it’s important to name that. 1/5 There is nothing about pregnancy that says a female needs to have climaxed.

Or enjoyed the act.

Or consented to it.

Or been aware of it.

But just about every pregnancy requires a biological male climaxing at some point, and every single unwanted pregnancy does. 2/5
Jan 3 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I been workin my way thru this book, and so far, the thing I been struggling the most with is…

Random white people was really out here writing J. Edgar Hoover letters like he was Americana Claus? 😭😭😭

I read A LOT about this particular time period, but this is SHOCKING 😮‍💨 Image Not once have I been like “man, I have a question about Christian fidelity, I wonder what the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has to say about it…”

This book has opened a whole new corridor of American history for me to explore!!!!
Dec 29, 2023 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
Aight, iono if this tweet was composed in response to my earlier tweet about Jesus being the Word of God or not, but I’m temporarily suspending my practice of blacking out identities—not to dunk on Neil—but so the full context of his question can be addressed. 1/11 For reference, here is the tweet I sent earlier. 2/11
Dec 28, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
The reason Nikki Haley has to contort herself to answer this question is because the outcome of the Civil War was a *stronger* Federal government where states had *less* latitude to legally marginalize—which is the exact thing conservative philosophy demands she stand against. This is all very simple.

The Civil War was fought because southern states felt the federal government was poised to impinge on their right to incorporate a perpetually enslaved underclass into their frantic of their society.

And they lost.
Dec 27, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
This is a great and important question, and one I’ll answer here for anyone else wrestling with this:

The New Testament uses the language of Jewish redemption largely because its authors originally operated within a Jewish framework.

HOWEVER… 1/7 The claims they made about salvation/redemption and the universality of sin/evil were primarily answering questions that were frankly not a primary concern of Judaism specifically.

Allow me to draw a (very rough) analogy to another situation to illustrate my point here: 2/7
Dec 27, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is a lot easier to understand when we remember that many of the most ardent supporters of the colonization of (what is now) Liberia (like the American Colonization Society) were very clearly anti-Black and simply wanted their country rid of free Black people. Bigotry makes for strange bedfellows.
Dec 27, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
A ridiculously high amount of what passes for mainstream Christian theology is people who think they understand more about Judaism than they actually do making what they think they understand about Judaism their whole personality.

Which is wild, cuz we ain’t gotta do that. It is remarkably easy to present the gospel without posing as an expert on Second Temple Judaism or ancient Israelite religion and exposing ourselves as frauds, lol
Dec 24, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Me to my pastor this morning: “it’s probably a good thing you’re not on Twitter anymore. I waged a days-long war against the penal substitutionary theory of atonement, and not everybody was all that happy about it.”

My pastor: Little known fact: my pastor, a gentleman who is as responsible for my mentoring and spiritual formation as anyone else on this planet, is a Dallas Theological Seminary grad, and not at all who y’all would assume could rock with someone like me.
Dec 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
If y’all would like to see a prime example of aggressively unserious prooftexting, I’d encourage you (if you can afford to regret wasting time) to go look up the versions of the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith and actually look at all the scriptures in the footnotes. The prooftexts in that 1689 Confession’s footnotes are SO HORRENDOUS that is actually distracts from the confessions being made.

They would cause someone who was objectively evaluating them to question their credibility.

Ask me how I know 🙃
Dec 22, 2023 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
Aight, let’s have a quick conversation about prooftexting, and why it is the absolute least serious way to engage someone who does not already hold the position you do.

Cuz I recognize that prooftexting is the default for many of us. But there is a better way. 1/15 Firstly, we gotta understand that prooftexts are things used to SUPPORT positions and doctrines, not necessarily *develop* them.

When we prooftext, we are carrying assumptions into the text.

Which is something we all do. But we need to be honest.

I’ll provide an example: 2/15
Dec 21, 2023 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
After dragging PSA up & down the block, I owe y’all this clarity.

I subscribe to Christus Victor.

The cross exposes the depth of human wickedness and the depravity of worldly power.

The resurrection declares God’s power over that wickedness and depravity.

Love conquers sin. Not only does that make more sense than “God couldn’t forgive us until his son was tortured”, it is UNQUESTIONABLY better news.

Atonement theories are largely irrelevant in the practical sense, except equating barbarity with the fulfillment of justice is quite obviously harmful.