The recent endorsement of Gavin Ortlund by James White is not an isolated incident. Instead, it represents a broader pattern of Big Eva behavior. While it represents a liberal shift for James White, who was once solid against the creep of Social Justice into the church only to endorse the new waterboy for Tim Keller’s Third Wayism, there is something supernatural at play here, a strategy for building a pool of leaders the enemy is using.
Gavin Ortlund is not a typical nepobaby. There are a lot of those in Evangelicalism because Big Eva can be a lucrative family business. The rise of Ortlund’s prominence is not a matter of mere nepotism for his father Ray Ortlund. Gavin Ortlund is well-connected. He goes to Russell Moore’s church, serving in leadership. He’s a member of the Tim Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, the who’s who of rising liberal stars. But among this roster, Ortlund stands out even among his pastor, Sam Allberry, for having a sizable influence outside the local church.
In the past, Big Eva granted favor to megachurch pastors who struck out on their own and planted large churches using the latest marketing techniques and consumer trends to their advantage. Also in the past, denominational hierarchy and influence translated to Big Eva. But such is no longer the case. The old generation could fail upward in Evangelicalism, but the landscape is changing. It is becoming increasingly post-denominational, a subject too separate to get into for this article, but it will make it difficult for any denomination to increase its ranks with new churches.
Megachurches are also becoming a dime a dozen. Every suburb seems to have its aspiring megachurch, maybe even a rivalry of aspiring megachurches. So megachurches are no longer a reliable starting point for Big Eva aspirations.
But Gavin Ortlund has carved out a path that Big Eva has wanted to tap: YouTube. At 108K subs, Gavin Ortlund has grown tremendously and left his previous pastoral stint to pursue his online ministry. YouTube is a proving ground for talent, and Big Eva has started to recognize this as the landscape for the future.
Earlier this year, apologist Wesley Huff landed on Joe Rogan and instantly had more influence than any apologist in the last several years. Where Huff will end up is yet to be determined, but Gavin Ortlund is already an avowed theological liberal via his commitment to Third Wayism and local flood.
And so Big Eva is astroturfing him. In addition to being a part of the Keller Center, Russell Moore gave his book an award at Christianity Today, and Ed Stetzer’s gay-affirming Church Leaders is also promoting Ortlund’s material.
Ortlund’s achievements on YouTube have him as Big Eva’s golden boy as they are slowly recognizing the changing landscape of the culture. In contrast, YouTube has been a proving ground for the next generation of church heroes because they cannot break ground in Big Eva or denominations, so they turn to social media instead. The beast of Big Eva is adapting.
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Ortlund just released a video defending himself from the charge of liberalism. An interesting part of his argument is that many fundamentalist and Reformed leaders of the past were old-earth, and he also appeals to patristic rejections of literal eight-day schemes. Now, what is important about the appeal to the old fundamentalists, etc. is that those people used exegetical ploys such as day-age or the gap theory. These interpretations have been exegetically exploded and abandoned. The result is that more recent old earth interpretations have turned to a mythopoetic genre interpretation. As this affects the interpretation of the whole text, the implications are more radical, and it is not the same view as the old fundamentalist one.
All Gavin’s defense proves is that Calvinism and Catholicism have always been liberal. And that’s obvious, as they follow the ultimate liberal, the African Augustine. It was through Augustine’s liberalism that the gay “born that way” excuse was hatched for the soon to be “celibate” clergy, as Augustine brought in celibate clergy requirements at the Council of Carthage to hide his homosexuality behind a “I’m a celibate priest” excuse, which is what created the Romanish church.
Augustine was a former heterosexual cohabitator, and was Italian on his father’s side and either Italian or Berbers on his mother’s side. He was not a black African at all, and he believed strongly in the curse of Ham, whatever else may and perhaps in some cases must be said about him.
Then why did he push priestly celibacy? It was either that be became a homosexual, OR that he was purposefully assimilating Manicheanism into Catholicism in an attempt to make it more popular. That could explain the push for priestly celibacy, for original sin (being ontologically sinful due to being made of matter), and of Mary worship also (as the Manicheans venerated female Buddhist goddesses since Mani mixed Buddhism into his religion). So at the least, Augustine was a synchretist heretic heresiarch purposefully mixing Manicheanism into Catholicism. It doesn’t make any sense to continue to think of him as a saint or keep the teachings he came up with that differ from the first 4 centuries of the church.