UNITED STATES
Baptist News
BOB ALLEN | APRIL 21, 2016
Child abuse isn’t just a Catholic problem, it’s also a Calvinist problem, according to an April 20 podcast sympathetic to the so-called “young, restless and reformed” movement popular among evangelicals belonging to denominations including the Southern Baptist Convention.
Mortification of Spin, a weekly podcast from the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals — a coalition of pastors, scholars, and churchmen seeking to recover and promote biblical doctrines central to the Protestant Reformation — this week examined highly publicized scandals involving celebrity preachers accused of turning a blind eye at the expense of victims of child sexual abuse.
While they don’t say so explicitly, the program’s three cohosts appear to have in mind last week’s appearance at the Together for the Gospel conference in Louisville, Ky., by C.J. Mahaney, a T4G founder who for years has faced unanswered allegations of mishandling abuse as a pastor and ministry leader in a lawsuit thrown out of court on a legal technicality.
“When we’re dealing with pastors and elders, we’re not dealing with legal burden of proof,” Carl Trueman, a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary said, referring to a qualification in 1 Timothy 3:7 that an overseer “must be well thought of by outsiders so that he may not fall into disgrace and into a snare of the devil.”
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