As I said, I agree in the main with his exegetical comments and doctrinally. But his presentation is tedious. Even he must have noticed eyes glazing over at one point, he mentions it several times.

I wonder if this is on purpose, or just subliminal?

Sometimes I think we get a real elitism among these guys, essentially instructing the people to “leave it to the priests”, its too complicated for the likes of you. Bauder appears to love using long words, Hebrew and Greek, etc. For what purpose? I used to get marked down by Mike Barrett in particular for using long words in a paper. He was after training preachers, not scholars. I think there is a difference.

I’ll have more to come on this later. There are serious differences with some of Bauder’s assertions.

Maranatha!
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3

I listened to the first half of the first lecture, and one thing that bothers me with Bauder’s presentation, and now many others like him, is that he makes separation sound more difficult than it is—he wants us just to grapple with these concepts, essentially, consider doing some separation. It seems to target the young fundamentalists, who don’t like hearing anything dogmatic, so rather than giving specifics and even mentioning names, you offer concepts worth considering. With that level of confidence and conviction, I wouldn’t see separation as too much of a necessity, perhaps only a tertiary issue.

On the practice/deeds part of your post, I see many fundamentalists as nullifying separation over behavior based on uncertainty of meaning that dovetails with postmodernism and the emergent church. They will gladly separate over certainty, KJVO/skirts on women, etc., but they embrace uncertainty. We’ve got to give Piper a pass because he just sees these practice issues differently than us and we’ve got to give him some latitude for application of these passages. “We’ve got to look past these secondary issues to the gospel content alone as the basis for unity.”