He who laughs last laughs best” – The Christmas Prince, 1608 England
I don’t know who Chris Bolt is, exactly. He’s one of these twitter personalities who seem to have no life or societal impact other than what happens in 280 characters or less. Once upon a time, however, he blogged. And, Bolt blogged about me. A lot.
Bolt has opinions on Twitter still, although I can’t tell that his blogging has kept up. It seems that his last post was many moons ago at his website (unless he has another). His site doesn’t have a web-rank at all, which means it has so few readers it might as well not exist at all. Bolt still talks on Twitter, however.
Today, I saw a screenshot from Bolt, claiming that Mohler’s SBTS provost, Matthew Hall, did not recently say he was a racist. What’s amazing is that Hall is on video saying this. Bolt watched the video, and then said that Hall did not say what Hall said. It’s quite amazing to watch his self-deception.
You can watch it yourself below.
Wherever there is a liberal to defend, there Bolt is to do it. Wherever there are cold, hard facts to deny, there Bolt is to chime in with contradiction. Wherever someone is saying, “Move along, Citizen, nothing to see here,” that someone is probably Chris Bolt.
Bolt wrote about me most prolifically when Pulpit & Pen was the first one to warn the SBC about Karen Swallow Prior back in 2015. That post was entitled, Gay Affirming Research Fellow at ERLC, Shocking Liberalism.
Although we were heavily attacked at the time and it caused a bit of a skirmish among even our own publication’s writing staff, time has aged our posts about Karen Swallow Prior like fine wine. They are only better with time. Today, Karen Swallow Prior is at the very epicenter of the Great Baptist Schism of 2019 as everyone and their dog knows that Prior is an egregious liberal. The only ones defending Prior are those who are themselves widely and universally marked as liberals.
The only ones who deny the above statement are those foolish enough to believe that Southern Baptists can’t be liberals. They think “a little claim of inerrancy here” and “a little affirmation of the BF&M there” is some kind of bulwark against liberalism like garlic keeps away vampires. They’re simple-minded people.
Bolt wrote several posts back then in defense of Karen Swallow Prior, including JD Hall’s Gay Witch Hunt, Greg Smith on the False Accusations Against Karen Swallow Prior and The Most Damning Piece of Pulpit & Pen’s Presentation on Karen Swallow Prior: Transgender Restrooms and Egalitarianism.
In those articles, Bolt claimed that Karen Swallow Prior was as conservative as the day is long and Pulpit & Pen was just “misrepresenting” her views. Needless to say, considering she went on to say that “abortion is not murder” and endorse the pro-LGBT Revoice conference (both before and after it happened), I feel totally vindicated.
The latest scandal is that now in 2019, the SBC has caught on to the fact that Prior is not a complementarian. Danny Akin, SEBTS president – and her new boss – errantly went out on a limb to swear up and down she was. But then…facts got in the way and now Danny has made himself into Balaam’s Limousine.
Thankfully, Bolt transcribed my words from a podcast in 2015, thus freezing them in the Internet’s carbonite…
She did give an answer when I asked her if she was a complementarian because she’s written a post about why she’s not a complementarian or an egalitarian. Because, you know, if you’re nuanced you don’t like labels. You know, it makes what you believe [laugh] just too clear to people. So, she did respond and said, “No I’m not a complementarian, I’m not an egalitarian, I hold to the Baptist Faith and Message 2000,” which I thought was an odd response because first of all the BF&M 2000 does speak of male headship. It doesn’t use the word complementarian but that is most certainly not an egalitarian document and it’s very complementarian. And I’m pretty sure, I dunno, it’s just a conservative estimate, ninety-percent-plus of Southern Baptists in the pew or pulpit would affirm complementarianism whether or not they knew what the word meant.
And I just gotta ask the question of Southern Baptist leaders, how long is this going to go on? How long is this going to go on? We have someone working at the ERLC who can’t call themselves complementarian, can’t affirm complementarianism. Is it nebulous? Is it vague? It’s not clear that Southern Baptists believe in a complementariam ecclesiology and home structure?
Everything now being discovered about Prior that is causing a massive breach of peace in the SBC, I personally warned the world about in 2015.
Chris Bolt said at the time, “Nothing to see here, Citizen, move along.”
Prior is now single-handedly ripping the Southern Baptist Convention in two and pew-sitters are simply not tolerating her employment at SEBTS (which might have been a mistake so extraordinarily dumb you have to be locked in the ivory tower not to know it was a bad idea).
Bolt even rejoiced that several associates or writers at Pulpit & Pen denounced us for our warnings at Prior. One was Greg Smith and the other was Tom Buck. Yeah, so…I told you so. I don’t mind rubbing it in that Smith is now the chief proofreader for our publication (and has since clarified that he does share the substance of our criticisms of Prior) and Buck went on to ask for her resignation from the ERLC for being gay-affirming. The irony, right?
It seems that everybody but Chris Bolt has acknowledged by P&P was right about Prior all along. You can’t kill the truth, baby. Love P&P or hate us, you have to admit our track record on discernment is spot-on and usually prophetic.
Do you remember your ten-year or perhaps twenty-year class reunion? You walked in and saw that girl who, last your remembered her, was kinda attractive? Sure, she might not have ever been the prettiest girl, but she wasn’t half bad. She was the homecoming queen or prom queen or debutant or just the high school’s resident hot girl.
But then…then you walked into the reunion and wowser. She’s unrecognizable. She is now obese, cigarette-stained, and wearing sweat pants with a muffin top that looks like it needs to go back into the oven. She has, for lack of a better phrase, ‘let herself go.’ She did not age well.
That’s Chris Bolt’s blog article about Karen Swallow Prior. They are beyond middle-aged and unkempt. Looking back, they seemed attractive at the time but in reality they were just full of bad ideas. They will, like the swan-turned-ugly-duckling, probably die an early death from poor health.
In short, they aged poorly.
