The American Churchman: Christian Apologetics and Modernity

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00:22

And welcome to the American Churchmen podcast, where we encourage men to take responsibility, to love the

00:27

Lord, to pursue the right, the good, the true, the beautiful. I am your host, Jon Harris, my co -host,

00:33

Matthew Pearson. And we are going to talk today about some apologetic stuff. But before we do, how are you doing,

00:39

Matthew? I'm doing good, Jon. I'm doing good. I heard that you have a busy schedule today, so this episode may be a little more succinct.

00:47

But everything you told me sounds like it's going to be a good lineup. So if you're enjoying listening to this show, keep an eye out for what

00:53

Jon has coming, too. Yeah, I'm going to actually be in Illinois. No, Indiana. Ah, I get those two confused.

00:59

That's not good. Indiana this coming weekend. So I'd love to see you there. I'll be in Texas next week.

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JonHarrisMedia .com. Of course, TruthScript is the one that actually sponsors this podcast. You can go to TruthScript .com

01:11

and we're going to discuss an article I wrote. So it should be pretty easy. I kind of know the author. But yeah,

01:16

I wanted to say, Matthew, I'm proud of you. I'm like you're doing it right from the beginning, going out tonight to date your wife, even after you're married.

01:27

So I just want to commend you for that. Oh, well, thank you, Jon. Thank you. Some people don't do it right.

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You get married and then it's like, well, we don't need a date anymore because we're married. But this is something I've tried to do since I got married is like once a week.

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It's probably very few weeks I've missed it. We go out on a date. It could be like five guys. It could be something really like low key.

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But don't stop dating your wife. An old guy told me that before I got married and it's worked pretty well for me.

01:54

So anyway, I have one last question on a personal level. Where do you guys go?

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Do you have a place set yet or like a rhythm? Is it a nice place? Is it McDonald's? Probably not

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McDonald's. But no, no, no. Like fast. So that doesn't count. That's only on the fly. And she's she's really crunchy.

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So she has her limit with what she can tolerate. And even my stomach does too. No, we're just going to this like little, you know,

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I'm being a multiculturalism enjoyer, taking her to a nice little Mexican restaurant tonight. So she gets a nice steak burrito with some margs and all that.

02:27

So looking forward to that. But for us, because we're very, you know, we're just really like financially, you know, because we're both students, we try to do date night at least like two or three times, like a month, something like that.

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So, you know, it's nice. It's fun. It's good. You know, but as of today, I've been married a month, so I'm an expert on marriage now.

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So I'm ready to counsel people on how to have good and successful marriages, because I know all of what it's about now.

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So you could do I mean, I don't know. Do you guys like Dunkin Donuts or like Starbucks or coffee out of like coffee?

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Does that count? She's a she's a coffee fiend. No, coffee does not count as a date because I have gotten so much coffee every day from this woman since I met her.

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OK, yeah. So we this is like our Dunkin Donuts summer. And I hate the Dunkin Donuts at Dunkin, but their refreshers are good.

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So and now, of course, she's doing pumpkin spice. So that actually can count in my mind. In my mind, that's a date. You go to Dunkin.

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Oh, yeah. Take a walk. The Floyd's love pumpkin spice. We've been doing a lot of pumpkin stuff. She made pumpkin sourdough bread.

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I'm so happy. So that's wow. Yeah, it doesn't really get more white girl than that, to be honest.

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No, it's nice. I love you know, it's wonderful. I'm enjoying the fruits of her labor. All right.

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Well, excellent. Now let's transition to slavery. No, Bob, the

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Baptist is streaming here. He says, what's up, guys? Oh, I've seen a few of his YouTube videos. Hi, Bob.

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I don't know for mutuals on Twitter at all, but I've seen some of your YouTube stuff. Yeah, I started watching him maybe,

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I don't know, two months, three months ago. And now every time I see one of his videos, I look for what's holding his microphone up.

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And if you've noticed, he's got like something different in every video. Holding his microphone. So the last one was a skeleton,

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I think for Halloween. And so anyway, Bob, good to have you here.

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We're going to sort of transition to something more serious here. But I just I want to say like this last week, maybe two weeks now, there's been a lot of talk unexpectedly about slavery and the

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Bible. And this topic comes up every now and then. But I think because Allie, and this is why

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I've made the YouTube thumbnail the way I did. I wasn't picking on those people. But Allie Beth Stuckey was on a show called

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Jubilee, where she's surrounded by all these progressive, quote unquote, Christians. And one of the exchanges was between her and this other guy.

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And he was trying to nail her on slavery and how the Bible endorses this on some level.

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And then the other one was I think it's two days ago. Josh Hames, who's a podcaster, and I'm friends with him.

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I actually talked to him right after all of this went down. But he he did a podcast and he was actually

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I think he was examining or talking about what Allie's her exchange with with this guy named

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Whitaker on Jubilee. And he says in the process, he says that slavery is not a sin.

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And he went on to qualify it. But, of course, there was a leftist media outlet that just took that one quote and without the qualifications, put it out there.

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And he had a mob after him. And so I talked to him and he was kind of bummed. And his big thing that he was bummed about, he goes,

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I just feel like people are upset at me for believing something I don't actually believe. Like, I'm not for slavery.

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I'm not saying that slavery is a positive good in a universal sense. I'm just saying the

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Bible regulated it and it's not a sin in and of itself. And what are we going to do with biblical ethics?

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And I this is a challenge. So I think what I want to do in this podcast and we'll get Matthew's take on it is talk about apologetics, how to defend the

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Bible. And I don't think slavery is unique here. You have things like equality between men and women and whether or not social equality is something that the

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Bible endorses or is out of step with. And you could talk about all kinds of other things, the laws in the

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Old Testament for civil punishments that seem harsh, the Amalekites or the Canaanites and their quote unquote genocide.

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That's what the atheists call it, right? So we could go on and on about the ways that the Bible's ethical teachings as applied in the ancient world just differ with some of the things that are taken for granted in the modern world.

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So that's where we're going with the show. This is the article for people who just want to get the too long, didn't read version here.

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Oh, that's not it. Oh, I didn't have it pulled up. OK, so you can go to TrueScript .com if you want to see the article here.

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Here's what it looks like. And it's called Slavery, Scripture and the Limits of Apologetics. Maybe we'll read through it as we go.

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And then one last thing I'll say is if you like this podcast, check out TrueScript, scroll to the bottom.

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There's a publish tab if you want to publish with us. There's also a donate tab. We are 501c3. OK, so Matthew, that's my intro to this subject.

07:27

I know you read the article and you're probably familiar with the situations I brought up. Any thoughts before we get into the paragraphs and reading what

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I said? Yeah, absolutely. Many thoughts, which I will try to consolidate in one line of thought.

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But the thing about approaching these topics is that you do have to do so with both wisdom, prudence, being able to discern, but also with courage and boldness.

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And the reason why is because we have to make sure that we check ourselves to see is our minds, is everything that we do and think, is it captive to God's word or is it captive to what the culture tells us, to what we hear because of the results of decades or hundreds of years of prior things which conform our minds to a certain way of thinking and things like that.

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So you have to make sure that you are in line with scripture, even if it doesn't sound the best, most modern sensitivities and things like that.

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And we spoke about something of this degree. I don't know if it was slavery in particular, but it was some topic like a bunch of episodes back.

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And I read this one tweet from Cal Carusas that I do want to read again. Cal is an excellent podcast.

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I'd commend your listeners to check them out, check them out. He says about it, he says in his tweet,

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Christianity is bigoted, misogynistic, weird, incompatible with most modern sentiments from a different age that's primitive.

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The woke more correct than big Eva feminists. The Bible doesn't belong to them. Break off the rusty shackles of respectability.

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And he did phrase that in a way to stir up some people and excite a bit.

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But there is a sense in which like that is absolutely true that the Bible sensibilities are going to be different than the sensibilities of the modern world.

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And you need to know that when you're looking at scriptures and you need to believe God rather than man.

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And the thing too, is like scripture does have a lot of things that can be said to be hard sayings, but because of faith, we take it and we believe it.

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That doesn't mean that it's illogical. That doesn't mean that you can't approach it with reason. What it means is who do

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I trust more, myself and my fallible mind or God and his infallible and inerrant word.

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And this is an issue that is not, I mean, like we talk about, oh, modernity, the things of the modern world, it's all so bad, but this is not like something totally new.

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This is something that even many of the church fathers had to deal with. And the reason why allegorical readings, this is not the only reason, of course, like the apostle

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Paul engages in allegory in Galatians. Allegory is not like an entirely like antithetical concept to scriptural hermeneutics insofar as I would say it's scripturally warranted or it's just like absolutely obviously about Christ or if it's used as application and it doesn't erode the literal meaning.

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But a lot of the reason why so many people in the early church, like in the patristic age did engage in some of these allegorical readings apart from spiritual application or Christological purposes was sometimes they did want to explain away the harder parts of scripture.

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So if you want to sort of see like how that works, you can read Hans Boersma. He wrote a book called

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Scripture as Real Presence, sort of going through patristic exegesis and how they did allegory. But just read a lot of Origen's sermons on things.

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Origen would allegorize away certain things that were a bit more difficult or the Lord would not do this.

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Therefore, you know, this is an allegory for this. Or even Gregory of Nyssa in his The Life of Moses, he does something similar in order to uphold the justice of God.

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So I would say that this is a temptation, which is not new, but it has always existed because it's not as if, you know, ethics and things like that.

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Everybody was just like super brutal back then, though there are many cultures that were we can talk about with that, with, you know, the

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Roman Empire and other things. But the thing is, is that people have always had a conscience given to them by God, which is it views injustice as wicked, as evil and for good reason.

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But sometimes we miss a we misjudge based off of our conscience, because, like I said, we are fallible.

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And so ultimately, we have to submit ourselves to what God has revealed. We ought not to try to explain away things that bother us.

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You don't have to allegorize a story. I don't know if anybody has done this. I'm sure maybe someone has. But when

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God tells Abraham to kill his son, we don't have to allegorize that way and be like, no, God would never do that.

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No, you see like the bigger picture and that story as well. When you look at the conquest of Canaan and all these things, you don't have to allegorize it as way what you have to do is take scripture for what it is, see

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God as a righteous judge and that all that he does in his providence and his plans and all the things which he ordains.

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Think to that that one hymn, which name I forgot, which says, whatever my God ordains is right, because the

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Lord is the judge and he is the standard for right and wrong. He is the the basis for morality because he is himself morality in a sense.

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So anyways, that's my word vomit on that topic. Hope it's somewhat helpful for framing this conversation.

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Yeah, I mean, we could totally go in at a different direction. I'm almost tempted a little, but, you know, for some of the

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EO and RC guys, you mean some early church fathers might have gotten things wrong? Yes, actually, some of them did get some things wrong and did it one of the

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I don't know who did it first, but the allegorization of Song of Solomon, where like this can't be in the

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Bible. This is inappropriate. This is too like zesty. So like, let's make this about Christ in the church.

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And we could have a fun conversation about that, because I actually do think it's an allegory for Christ in the church. Do you do you think you believe there's a double meaning?

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Like, so it's it's about Christ in the church, but it's also about an actual romance or song.

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I mean, sure. And so I would say like the same principle is like the tortoise and the hare race, like it's using a real turtle or tortoise and a hare to communicate a broader story.

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I would say that it's using the imagery and symbolism and the idea of a sexual relation to communicate the mystical union

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Christ and the church have. But I haven't read on that in a while. So that may be a topic for another day. But no,

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I do affirm that I was just on that as a fun side. Well, I think in the sense like By the way, Charles Spurgeon does.

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Charles Spurgeon. Yeah, well, a lot of people did. I think it carried through the ages. So I had a professor,

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William Barner at masters. This was an undergrad, and he had the view that Solomon.

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Book of Song of Solomon was actually Solomon's the bad guy in the book. So it's actually not about the perfect love.

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Solomon's trying to pursue this girl. And it's the what is it?

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The Shulamite or whatever. Yeah, I heard that that's the actual lover. That's and so he kind of messed me up on the whole thing.

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And I've never been able to shake that view. I've read it a few times and people have said, oh, that sounds crazy.

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And I'm like, I don't know. It's hard for me because he kind of like he made me read it that way. Now that's how I look at it.

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But interesting. Yeah. But so even if it is about, though, let's say the love that a man and a woman have for each other in a perfect sense, like this is how they should, even in a state of innocence, this is how they should love each other.

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I suppose I could go with you with like, because the relationship Christ has with the church is also that there's a connection between them.

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I just I have a hard time believing, though. It was in the Old Testament time meant to be an allegory of Christ in the church.

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That's that's a hang up for me. But anyway, shadows, shadows, just saying types and shadows.

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Yeah, you're right now. I know I'm so hesitant to read into that so much, though, because it gets like weird sometimes.

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Like I remember Beth Moore, not that I ever watched or did any Beth Moore studies, but some some will just say ladies.

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I knew that we're making the argument because Beth Moore made the argument that if you look at the temple from a bird's eye view and the movements of the priest, it creates a cross.

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So you're like, you know, it's like the laminate thing. Like, oh, like in all our

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DNA, there's a cross. It's laminate. It's imprint on creation. You're like, I don't I don't know if that's.

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So there are rules, I think, obviously, in hermeneutics to figure out if it's a type shadow, what is this?

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But but but to your point and to get back to, I guess, the real topic here that we're talking about to for the motivation of trying to sweep something under the rug, like we're not going to take this scripture literally, because if we do that, oh, no, it's out of step with our current times.

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Yeah, this makes you a slave to no pun intended. The opinions that are popular in your present age and you can't like what are you going to do in 100 years when the opinions change?

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Are you just going to morph the Bible at that point into something new entirely? So I think that's your point.

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And that makes total sense to me. And on the topic of slavery, which is the topic that we're going to be talking about a little bit,

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I think this is particularly difficult because we have had slavery universally in every culture just about until about five minutes ago.

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It really until the Industrial Revolution, there was slavery in some form in just about every country at some point.

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And whether you even want to say feudalism, I mean, feudalism effectively is like a type of slavery, like, oh, but you could leave.

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Yeah, well, where are you going to go? Right. Like, how are you going to leave? Exactly. You're dependent on this, the person who owns your land, and hopefully that person's benevolent.

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But the serfdom, right, all these things that even existed in Europe among homogenized societies were effectively not much different than slavery in the sense that we think about it.

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So, you know, how do you take an ancient book that's pre -Industrial Revolution, that's pre -modern?

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How do you import the morality from that book into our modern age without endorsing all the institutions that it was applied to?

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I think that's the question, really. And then the other thing, and maybe we can go this direction, is also what institutions are we just not aware of because of our presentism?

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Because we think we're so enlightened in this age, we don't realize the slavery that does exist around us in maybe even crueler forms at times.

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And we're just oblivious because we don't call it slavery. We don't categorize it that way. And I think there's a number of things we could probably put as candidates for that.

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So all right, I'll just read like a paragraph or a few paragraphs, and then we can discuss,

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I guess, as we go. This was sort of my own brainstorm, I suppose, when I wrote this. But so Allie Stuckey appeared on Jubilee.

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She was surrounded by 20 liberals. And there was this one exchange that drew particular attention with Tim Whitaker over the

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Bible and slavery. Whitaker pressed Allie repeatedly on whether the Bible condoned slavery by regulating the practice instead of opposing the institution outright.

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His point was that morality evolves beyond the Bible's ancient applications. Stuckey was put on the defensive.

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And if her understanding of the Bible and slavery came from most of the current apologists like Tom Holland, why wouldn't she be?

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And so I'll ask you this, Matthew, we'll stop there for a second. This idea that morality evolves,

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I saw another Christian apologist make a similar point that there's sort of this unfolding of,

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I don't even know how to phrase it. I'm trying to remember the way that this person phrased it. There is a, you can see in scripture as you read it, like a general trend towards more and more and more freedom and less and less slavery and taking verses in the

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New Testament like, hey, look, Philemon's a Christian brother now, right? Look at him that way as reading into it to say, well, that undercut.

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That was a total undercut of slavery. That was the seeds of slavery's destruction as a labor connection between two groups.

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It was essentially undermining the institution in a subversive way because, you know, you couldn't just come out there and say you're against slavery at that time.

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If you did that, you know, the Romans and the Greeks, the Greco -Roman people would have thought you were crazy or something.

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So you got to like do it subversively. I'll pitch it to you, Matthew. What do you think of that argument? Because I hear that quite a bit.

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The the argument, the idea that sort of morality like unfolds over time or. Yeah, I don't know if I want to say progressive revelation, but that's how it comes across to me like the

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Old Testament was like dark ages. And hey, look, as things progress, God gets more and more like he starts revealing what he really thinks about this.

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In fact, I'll give you one example. I don't know if I have it. Do I have it pulled? Oh, yeah. So I don't know if this is a complete example of this, but Michael Carlino, I don't know if you know him.

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But he said slavery like divorce and polygamy, polygamy is rightly filed under the category of from the beginning.

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It was not so that Jesus mentioned in Matthew 19, eight, which I think is an interesting idea to kick around.

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But it's sort of like, you know, look at divorce like Moses allowed it, but that wasn't the way it was supposed to be.

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So people will say like they'll make a parallel and say, look at slavery in the

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New Testament. It seems like Paul and Jesus are trying to say things like Jesus says he came to set the captives free, for example, that he's trying to signal to us that that was never his intention really to regulate.

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Yeah, for that, I guess I would say that I'm not actually entirely opposed to the notion of not necessarily morality evolving, but maybe our understanding of certain like practices being like, maybe this ought not be so because this is the result of a fallen world.

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In principle, I'm not totally opposed to that. I think that you can have certain practices, which is like, because of the circumstances we're in, not because of morality, but maybe because of just various other factors, it would be a wise and prudent thing to slowly get rid of this and in favor of doing this practice, which just may, you know, just may have better utility.

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It just may be something different. I'm unsure if Jesus and the apostles had the same thing in mind, however, for something like slavery, especially when you just consider

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Philemon and that whole letter, like it doesn't seem to be that there's anything which would be calling for the entire abolition of the practice at the time.

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I think you could easily make the case that this just isn't a good practice to do because of X, Y, Z, but not because this practice is intrinsically sinful by virtue of the notion that you can own somebody's labor, which

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I don't see that to be the case in the New Testament. And even when you do have, you know, kind of going back to the patristics, even when you do have some of these church fathers writing about it,

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I think it's Gregory of Nysa. He was the only that I can think of off the top of my head, the only church father that was against it because he thought it was intrinsically evil.

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But a lot of these other guys, they'll concede that we have slavery and it's not the best, but it's permissible because X, Y, Z, but they'll even say that it's a result of being in a fallen world.

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So I forgot, Theodoret of Cyprus says that. I had to look at my book on the shelf, but his book on Providence, he sort of makes that similar point.

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But yeah, I mean, I just think that this idea that morality evolves though, it's not like morality is changing, but it's just because due to certain circumstances, situations that you may come to realize this practice shouldn't be good.

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And, you know, I have no issue saying that God regulated the system of slavery, that slavery as an institution in and of itself is not intrinsically evil.

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But what I would still say with that is it may not be the best form or the best system to practice.

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And therefore, if you have the means to abolish it in place of instituting like something else, which can be better, that we can say that as Christians.

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The thing is though, is that because of many of the horrors, whether it be propaganda or whether it really is true, because I do think that there were very obvious abuses in American slavery and things like that, because of our education and learning about that, people have this internal repulse to slavery because they associate it with the chattel slavery of the

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Americas and things like that. And so that sort of is what gets people really riled up about it. When, like I said, we need to be very level -headed, look at what the scriptures say, and then we can make a case against something, not by saying, oh, this institution in and of itself is intrinsically sinful, but this institution, because of certain circumstances or the culture or whatever, oftentimes leads towards abusive practices, and therefore it should be abolished.

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I mean, all of that to say, I think that you can be a good faith, like slavery, abolitionists, or maybe not abolitionists, they were a little crazy, incrementalists, maybe,

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I don't know. However, whatever you want to do, you can be that in good faith as a Christian, insofar as you're not impugning

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God with evil, and instead what you're saying is this leads to wicked practices and all that.

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But you do have to be careful with that line of thinking and make sure you do it with prudence, because I know

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I can make the exact same argument against the institution of marriage or the institution of civil government.

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How many marriages do we know where a guy marries a girl and she just leaves him out of nowhere for no good reason, he's left destitute?

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How many civil governments do we know where people were subjected to the worst tortures imaginable, genocided, withheld from food and things like that?

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Many things which are in and of themselves okay or good institutions because of fallen man are abused.

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And because of that, we as Christians, we as men can discuss what are ways to either improve this system or slowly get rid of it over time.

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And obviously, I wouldn't say the institution of slavery is something which would be as necessary to a functioning society as marriage or the civil government or things like that.

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It's just the principle that I'm trying to demonstrate is that there can be something which isn't intrinsically evil, but which can lead to evil and therefore needs either reform or slowly, incrementally do away with.

26:18

Yeah, that's like a prudential argument. And I agree with you on everything you said. I think you're not making like a universal argument that morality in every time and every context looks like this.

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There is a principle, I suppose you could say, and you do see this from Paul to at least,

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I would say to Augustine, where early church fathers pretty much all said, at least the ones

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I know who have written on the topic, that you need to practice moderation. You can't treat your slaves like they're animals.

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You have to treat them in a kindness way. I mean, Paul obviously says for masters to be just with their slaves.

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So I think that is and that's something that is in the Old Testament as well. You weren't supposed to be harsh with your slaves in the way that you treated them.

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But that being said, what you were talking, you brought to mind something that might be more of an application, a little closer to home for us.

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And it's not slavery per se, but the practice of dating. And I know because we talked about this last time

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I got in trouble for saying go date and stuff. But this was something, it was maybe a little more than that.

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But this was something that I think our parents generation, this was just the way that everyone found a wife or found a husband.

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It was this mechanism or this practice that was in our culture called dating. And there was a revulsion to that in my generation, or I should say,

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I guess it would be our parents. But when they were having kids, some of the Christians, at least, right. And some of this gets called purity culture.

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But they came up with this mechanism of courtship. And they said, actually, this is an older way of doing it. And we don't have the recreational side of it that makes dating so terrible.

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There's no, quote, unquote, date rape. There's no infatuation leading to bad arrangements like the parents have involvement.

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Some people went so far as to say arranged marriage should come back because as a kickback against dating, like this is a bad mechanism for finding a husband and wife.

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And there are some, I suppose, prudent critiques in this. But what I did notice at the time, and I notice it now, too, is there are

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Christians who want to say that their view on the mechanism for finding a wife or husband is the biblical one.

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I don't know. You probably heard this. It's like if you don't do it courtship, you're not actually biblical.

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And there's other people who will say like courtship is wrong and actually dating is the right way.

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It's the right mechanism to use. And I suppose this is a prudential decision,

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I guess is what I'm trying to say. It's about what context you're in. Are you applying biblical principles?

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And we have a different economy. We don't have an agrarian economy.

29:07

It's not like Isaac and Rebecca, where it's like no one around you shares your views and you can go and find a relative somewhere back home who is going to have a preset station in life.

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They've already been trained on how to be the wife of basically a farmer. And every man is basically a farmer.

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It's just not like that. People have different interests in different regions. It's a little bit more complicated,

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I think, at least. And so the mechanism by which you find a husband or wife is going to vary depending on your situation.

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So I'm not saying that slavery is a one and one to dating at all. I'm just saying that when that's going to get me in real trouble.

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I don't believe that. But I do think when you're looking at any ethical mechanism, you got to separate between what's situational and wisdom principle and then what's actually universal moral principle.

30:02

Is that fair? Yeah. No, I would 100 % agree with that. And I think the same thing when

30:08

I talk about politics with some people as well, where somebody asked me the other day, they were like, what do you think is the ideal form of civil government?

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Monarchy, this or that. And I'm just like, I don't know. It depends on the people. I think a constitutional republic can be permitted.

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I think if you have the monarchy may work better, whether it's absolute monarchy or whether it's a more constitutional monarchy, yada, yada, yada.

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All these systems are suited for the populations of the people. You get that from reading these reform jurists or these political theorists from the 16th and 17th century.

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But then you go and you read a lot of the paleo conservative guys and they're all saying the same thing. And part of the reason why so many

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American conservatives, why we have such a fierce love for the constitution and what was established by our forefathers is because it's our government.

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May we argue that it's the best form of government? Sure. Have people argue that? Yes. But it was suited for the

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American people. And that's part of why the American people love it. And I just think that's just such an important distinction to be able to make, because if you have this notion of, oh, well,

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I think the American form of civil government is the best. Then you're going and you're reading the

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Old Testament law. You're going to be like, oh, this doesn't allow for this liberty here, this liberty here. And it's just like, yeah, because it's an entirely different context with an entirely different group of people and for a different purpose.

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Because there's a sort of, if we want to use some biblical theology terms with it, which I'm not really a big biblical theology guy, but that's another rant for another day.

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But there's a redemptive historical context to that as well. And for the record to any chuds listening,

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I am by no means denying that we can be informed by the old covenant law. And I'm not saying, oh, well,

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Israel only had that law because they were the covenant people. Don't worry. I reject radical two kingdoms. But there's different contexts for things.

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And it's important to be able to recognize that so that you can actually not only read the scriptures better, but even so you can do politics better, you can think through politics better.

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You can do so much of these things that are going to be more suitable. And some people, when you do that, they may love you against you say, oh, well, then you're just a relativist or you think morality evolves.

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And no, that's not the case because there's a difference between what works best for particular peoples and is still in and of itself moral versus what may work best in a different way, which may be different in how it's done, but in substance is going to be oriented towards the same good.

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Yeah, and we only have had a market economy, the one we're familiar with, at least for a very short period of time.

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So most of human history, there really wasn't an option like so you have dependency created because not everyone owns land.

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Land is the literal only thing that can give you sustenance. And if you don't own the land, you have to work the land.

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You're going to work someone's land. So if you're working that someone's land, you develop some kind of an arrangement with them where it's mutually beneficial.

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And there's arrangements wherein you have people who, I mean, this is sort of the typical response today is like, why couldn't that have been wage labor?

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All of that. Why couldn't they just have been paid for their labor? It's like, well, where are they going to go live when the day's done?

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On what land? They don't own any. Right. It's like that's the same. The Lord's land.

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It's the master's land, whatever. It's going to be the same place. So like this arrangement becomes very tight knit, and it looks a little bit different in different places.

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But I think basically it all ends up becoming a type of very or very similar to what we think of when we think of slavery, because you really don't have anywhere to go.

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You really this is all, you know, this is generations basically like your dad did this.

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So you're going to do this. And and if you really messed up your life, right, you're going to be in debtor's prison.

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You're going to be in England. I'm thinking in that context, you're going to be in slavery of some kind. And the hope,

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I suppose, is that your leaders, your master, the king, who are like these all these hierarchies that existed, that they're going to be benevolent, kind, regulated by Christian charity.

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And that's how you'll have a life where there's mutual love, actually, even between. I know Washington Irving writes about this in Old Christmas.

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He goes back to England. He's looking for that old Christmas in the 1820s. He's like, we've lost it. We must find it again.

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And it's like found in this place where there's a lord of the manor who basically owns even the parish and pays the parson.

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You know, the parson's not even independent of the lord of the land. And then he has like this festival.

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And for whatever it is, 12 days, all the people who depend on him for their very sustenance can come in and reap the rewards of their labor because he throws them a big party.

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And they all love him for it. And he loves them because he knows he needs them in order to survive himself.

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Someone's got to work the land. That's just basically human history. And that's like the high point of it.

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That was like as good as it got because you actually had people that were Christian in upper echelons.

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But when you didn't have people who are Christian, I mean, it could be very brutal. And you either died or you were dependent on someone.

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And it's like there wasn't a third option, guys. It's like, what do you do? Right. Today, it's different.

35:38

But I think so this is my argument. Right. And I'll sort of summarize the rest of this article. I've seen the apologetics industry basically be behind the curve.

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They've tried to react to things. They're still they're just now starting to get out of fighting new atheists to fighting wokeness like it's just taking them a long time in the evangelical world to sort of catch up with where the social conversations are.

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And and I think they want to make many of them, at least Christianity palatable to modern liberals.

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Modern liberals do believe morality develops. It gets better because we evolve and they look back and they see the dark ages and they don't like it.

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They think that we got to separate ourselves from the clutches of religion, of heredity, of slavery, of, you know, you name it.

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Women being in a position where they're, you know, they're also enslaved to the patriarchy, et cetera.

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And so that they're egalitarians and they just think we're like marching towards more and more egalitarianism.

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And now it's like, you know, transgender and homosexual stuff are part of that. There's no way you can reconcile the

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Bible with this. There's no way. But there seems like there's an attempt to do that. And this is my suggestion.

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I'll get your reaction, Matthew. My suggestion is to go on the offensive. So what does that mean?

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They're against slavery. We'll take that example. OK, so are you are you against the modern forms of this that you see around you?

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How about the national debt? How about the usury, the predatory lending that has led so many, especially in your generation,

37:12

Matthew, to being in massive debt, to like debt they can't climb out of, really. It's just so massive at early ages.

37:20

Should that be allowed? How about all the pornography and the sex slavery that is tied in with that or the way illegal migrants are treated?

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And they become kind of a slave underclass in some industries. Or you could just go on and on.

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Sweatshop labor, the cobalt that's in your phone, the prison system and how the people who have committed crimes are basically doing work for the state.

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And we're sustaining them for decades, sometimes generational welfare.

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It's hard to get out of that. And it doesn't even give you dignity. So all of these things,

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I think, are very negative. And we can see the social impact of these things, but they don't categorize them as slavery.

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And so they sort of like turn up their noses at the past, while I think those who lived in even the 19th century would have looked at us and thought, oh, my goodness, look at all the abuses.

38:17

I'd like to figure out a way to help the apologetics industry address slavery in that way to go on the offensive, not to apologize for what the

38:28

Bible teaches, but to do what you also said, Matthew, and admit that, yes, there's prudent reasons to want self government and more responsibility.

38:37

And so slavery is an ideal. Yeah. No, I mean, very well said. I would definitely agree.

38:44

I think that part of doing it too is, what is the end of apologetics in defending the

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Christian faith? Part of the end is to not only strengthen your own faith, and not only to strengthen the faith of other

38:59

Christians, but also it's to try to win souls to Christ. And I think that particularly on the slavery thing,

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John, you brought up earlier about how we think of how Jesus came to set the captives free.

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But what is it freedom unto? It's freedom from slavery to sin, but it's slavery to Christ.

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Christ Jesus is your master, and you have been bought with a price. Therefore, you have freedom and service of him.

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So if you want to have a little bit of Jesus juking or whatever go on, you can talk about how if you want to get out of the debt slavery, and if you want to denounce the slavery of the past, part of it is realizing you're enslaved to sin.

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You're still a slave right now. And at worst, a much worse form, a much more abusive form of slavery and sin, which the

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Lord Jesus bought you to set you free, that you are free to serve him. And I think that's a lot of it is that Christ not to do the whole servant leader thing, because I think that oftentimes can be a little bit misguided in how people want to make you to where you're just walked over by everyone.

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But we are meant to serve other people too. That's part of living a virtuous life is that you serve others well.

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And so sometimes you do find freedom and service of other people. And what more freedom can you have than service to Christ, who is your master, who bought you with his own blood and has redeemed you?

40:27

So it's just, yeah, I think that what apologetics needs to focus on is not being...

40:34

When we say apologetics, we don't mean making apologies, like being like, oh, I'm sorry the Bible had to say that. Let me make this a bit more palatable.

40:41

It's not that kind of apologetics. It's to say, thus saith the Lord. And I myself am not a presuppositionalist.

40:48

I would not consider myself Vantillian in any regard. But I kind of liked the part in your article where you talked about when you first started getting into this for presuppositional apologetics, what a lot of it came down to.

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And what we as non -presupp guys, guys who are more, I guess, scholastic minded, if you want to be a bit more autistic about it, but not to be too offensive to any of the autistic people out there, but to get more entrenched in it and realize that sometimes you can just give good reason and say, thus saith the

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Lord. And we can trust what God says, what God lays out for us, because at the end of the day,

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God knows best. Think back to the Apostle Paul's discussion of election in Romans 9.

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Who are you to answer to the molder? Why have you made me this way? Or think of God's answer to Job, when

41:37

God's basically saying, did you do this? Did you do this? Did you do this? I didn't think so. So at the end of the day, a lot of it does have to come down to take

41:46

God's word for what it says and believe it and don't be embarrassed or ashamed about what the

41:53

Lord has revealed to us. Yeah. Amen. That's great. I think that's key, because the spirit of God is the one that is going to open up the hearts, right?

42:01

It's not the cleverness of our argument. That's, I think, something we forget oftentimes. If we can be clever enough, or I think there's sort of this perception that the media has made

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Christians out to be such bigots. We're going to go prove that we're not like that to people. And if we can just kind of show them, look how nice we are, look how you have a misunderstanding about it, which is probably true.

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The media does portray us a certain way, but that's going to be the thing that's going to bring them in.

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And it's like, no, that's not how it works. Actually, it's being confronted with their own sin. And so one of the reasons

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I love Ray Comfort so much, even though it's such a simple message, when those topics come up, he doesn't spend a lot of time on it.

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He'll turn it back around really quick to, so what about you?

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Have you committed violations against God's law, right? Have you lied, stealed, cheated?

43:00

Are you slave to sin? Are you looking with lust? That kind of thing. And I just remember, too, in the

43:08

Ten Commandments, slavery is actually brought up a few times. So even if you're going to do that, like the Bible just has this sort of in the next chapter,

43:14

Exodus 21, there's teaching on slavery. So I think there's a misunderstanding.

43:20

You could spend time, I guess, educating people on what that was in the old covenant and how actually it was a blessing.

43:25

You were part of the covenant if you were a foreigner, but you were a slave. You got the Sabbath rest, right?

43:31

You were you were considered to be part of under the jurisdiction of family, part of this institution.

43:36

But I think in an evangelistic slash apologetic encounter, yeah,

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I think the best thing is just to hold your ground and share the gospel and don't be ashamed of what the

43:50

Bible actually says. So we have a comment. We actually have a few comments, and we'll do those right now.

43:56

Ray, for five dollars, eliminating sinful behaviors moves believers toward holiness, contrary to reframing

44:02

LGBT behavior as holy. Imagine the slaver was born that way. I've never heard that argument, but I suppose that flies if you could say other orientations, right?

44:14

I was born with this orientation to own people's labor or something.

44:20

Quiana Shaw says, clarifying because people think chattel slavery was just in the Americas. I was she says that slavery was chattel because it means movable property.

44:31

Yeah, that is what chattel means. Essentially, it's movable property. Stormy Squad says slave master is literally how we relate to Christ, which is what you just said,

44:41

Matthew, all throughout the New Testament. If you have no framework for that, you can't understand our relationship to Christ.

44:48

Meritorious Senior says, if anyone causes a child to stumble, you'll reap where you did not. So man stealing was a capital offense.

44:55

Enemies under judgment receive mercy as perpetual slaves, so they might be saved. Yeah, good point.

45:00

Good point. Absolutely. Yeah, and the right you could talk about all those regulations that the Old Testament had in the

45:06

New Testament when it came to slavery because it was regulated. And Kimberly says, trust the spirit when you share the gospel.

45:15

So, amen. Yep. On that note, I think that's about all we have for today for the American Churchmen podcast, but appreciate you guys being along for the ride.

45:25

And I'm going to let Matthew, because he's hungry, he's going to go on a date and I'm going to jump to an interview with James Baird.

45:32

So on my other channel, Conversations That Matter, we're going to be talking about this book, King of Kings, and I'm looking forward to that.