71. The Need For Mere Christendom (Interview with Pastor Douglas Wilson)

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 71, my interview with Pastor Douglas Wilson. Well, hello everyone, and welcome back to the podcast.

My name is Kendall, and today we have a very special guest. We're very blessed to have one of my favorite pastors, theologians, authors, word ninjas, kingdom entrepreneur, lover of setting things on fire in November, and setting liberals' faces on fire as well.

He's also the chief cause of the disease called Doug Wilson Derangement Syndrome. I'd like to invite my good friend, Doug Wilson, to the show today. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Now, for anyone who is not aware of your work, not aware of who you are, not aware of what's going on out in Moscow, I am saying that right, Moscow, right?

Yeah, there's no cow in Moscow. Awesome. All right, so for anyone who's not familiar with those things, brother, could you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you've been working on,.

And some of those things like that? Sure, my day job is that of being the minister at Christ Church, which is a church here in Moscow, Idaho, which is a small university town in the panhandle of Idaho.

So we live up on the north end of Idaho, and I've been here since 1975 when I got out of the Navy, and that's my central occupation is preaching and pastoring, but I do a great deal of writing on the side.

So I blog and write books and so on. Awesome.

And pretty active on the media front as far as Canon Press and everything that you guys have going on there as well. I really enjoyed your documentary on the 11 things, not simple things, or not easy things, that's what it was.

Really enjoyed that. All right, so of late, you've been working on a ton of things. I just finished your book, Mere Christendom, and as far as I can surmise, it's the culmination of decades of things that you've been thinking about, things you've been thinking about for probably 30 years that have all kind of just come together in this book.

It's on the heels of Stephen Wolf's book, Christian Nationalism, which set Twitter on fire a little bit in the Christian Twitter spaces. A quick question just for my audience in case they've not read the book, what do you mean by Christendom, and why are you labeling it as Mere?

The Meaning of Christendom and Why It Is Called "Mere"

How do we start? Okay, that's a great question. So I would say that the first Christendom was, you could date it from when Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. And Christendom as a functioning body of nations who gave formal allegiance to the truth of the Christian faith continued, it sort of ended in a raggedy way.

I would say that the First World War was the convulsive end of Christendom, showed that it had become something of a shell, but Christendom existed up through the time of the Reformation. I believe that the United States was founded as self-consciously as a Christian nation.

And for the first century or century and a half of our existence, we thought of ourselves in those terms. So that'd be the first Christendom. And it ended as a result of a losing skirmish, not the final battle, not the final war, but the skirmish with the Enlightenment or the secularist project.

As a Christian, I want to see the Great Commission fulfilled. And I believe that involves tribes and nations and cities and so forth. And I would like us, when we realize that secularism is bankrupt and we reboot Christendom, think of that first thousand years as Christendom 1 .0.

And what I'm advocating is Christendom 2 .0, a rebooted Christendom. And in this reboot, I would like us to remove some of the bugs that manifested themselves in the First Christendom. And that's where the mirror comes in.

The mirror means that we don't want a Christendom that's all Presbyterian or all Lutheran or all Baptist. We don't want to go for denominational distinctives in the first instance. That was one of the problems with the First Christendom.

And one of the things that led to religious wars between various types of Christian. So mere Christendom would simply be the idea that the various nations of the world that are evangelized, acknowledged formally and publicly that Jesus rose from the dead.

I'm looking for affirmation of the Apostles' Creed basically and not getting into the differences between different types of Christians.

Got you. So you would say that Christendom is an awareness of Christ by the kings, by the nations, maybe not necessarily full on theocracy or theonomy, but an awareness of Christ and a structuring of society as it relates to a biblical worldview.

Correct. Theonomy or theocracy has different meanings to different people, almost all of them scary. And so if you ask any Christian who believes in public engagement of the Christian faith with politics and culture, if you ask, do you think that we should do things the way Jesus wants us to or not?

Well, everybody says, well, we should be doing what Jesus wants us to, which means that everybody's in principle a theocrat. But I understand that some people are spooked by the word. And when you say theocracy, they think Ayatollah Weirdbeards executing people for no particular reason.

And that's not what we're talking about at all. But if someone said, oh, you wanna take homosexuals up on the top of a high tower and push them off, I would say, A, number one, it's a different religion that wants to do that, okay, that does that.

And secondly, if you were to object to that, are you objecting to that because Jesus objects to it or not? If either Jesus objects to it or he doesn't, or he doesn't care, okay? If Jesus objects to it and I, as a Christian, object to it also for that reason, then that's theocracy.

I'm wanting the will of Christ to be followed in this situation. If Jesus doesn't care, then why should I? Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, but if Jesus, or if Jesus, worst case scenario, if Jesus approves of it, then shouldn't we approve of it?

So basically, the objection that people have to theocracy or theonomy is they are not objecting to righteous laws being implemented. They're objecting to unrighteous laws being implemented in the name of Christ.

And I am with them totally on that. And that's why I say mere Christendom. I don't want Christians to overreach, to overpromise, overreach, try to grab too much. That's a great distinction.

One of the questions I've had, and maybe you can help me with this, is obviously everything that happens on Twitter is real. But I would expect that someone who wasn't maybe aware of the distinctions that you're saying would say, gosh, I don't know if I really want the world to be a Christian world.

Like, we've tried that before in the Crusades or the Spanish Inquisition, the list goes on and on. But what I've been concerned about, or at least bothered by, is how many theologians or how many public figures or how many pastors, how many of the R. Scott Clark type, God bless him as well, who will say, I don't want a Christian nation.

Why would I want that? And that seems to me to be a very strange thing to say. Why do you think that we've gotten to that point to where we say, I don't want a Christian nation, or that seems strange that we would even want one?

Why Secular Neutrality Has Collapsed

I think a lot of Christians are still dazzled by the secularist promise that we can be neutral. Okay, so we can have a clean public square that's not covered with human feces or used needles. We can have a clean public square and all the citizens go home having enjoyed the benefits of this neutral public square.

And then they add their own private convictions as a condiment to what we all enjoy as Americans. So Christianity is a sauce that I put on my Americanism. A Hindu American puts a Hindu sauce on his Americanism and so on.

But this all rides on the assumption that Americanism is neutral, okay? And there was a period of time when that claim to neutrality was at least plausible. Okay, you could go around and people were being decent and orderly.

But now when we're dealing with drag shows and for kids and abortion on demand and same-sex mirage and all of these things and everything's coming apart and the secular establishment has turned on the Christians and arresting them, charging them for doing things that no one should ever be charged with, the pretense of neutrality has gone away, okay?

Now, if I were to have the privilege of talking to someone like Scott Clarke and he said, well, I don't want a Christian nation, I would say, well, is this something when Jesus gave us the Great Commission, did Jesus say, go and make disciples of all nations, but whatever you do, don't have them become a Christian nation?

Are you not wanting a Christian nation because you believe that Jesus does not want nations to become Christians? And if Jesus doesn't want them to become Christians, then of course, we shouldn't either.

We should conform to that, but in a weird sort of way, that goes back to my previous point, that's theocracy. Jesus wants secularism in the public square, but that's really odd when you think, if you're reading Genesis to Revelation, it would be a really odd turn for us to say, and then the culmination of Christian political theory is that the name of Christ must not be named.

No, from the rising of the sun to the going down in the same, the name of the Lord will be praised, honored. Disciple the nations, baptizing them, teaching them to obey all that I've commanded you. So the question is, who are the recipients, the ethnoi, when it says disciple the nation, disciple the ethnoi, who are those groups of people?

And when we teach the ethnoi to be obedient, what are we teaching them to do? Does this have anything to do with decisions to go to war? Does it have anything to do with their abortion policies? Does it have anything to do with how they define marriage?

So I think that basically the live and let live approach that many Christian theologians have is something that was plausible in the late 1950s. It is screamingly not plausible now.

Grace, Repentance, and the End of Self-Government

There's so much we could go into as far as this, but do you think that it really is a grace? I mean, I know so many Christians today are discouraged and frustrated about the state of the world. Like you said, the veneer sort of worn thin and you can see that it's just particle board underneath.

So would you say that the way that we look at this even, that this is a grace from the Lord that he's showing the insufficiency of the current system and awakening even us to understand that as Christians, these are things that we should have been thinking sort of all along.

That is exactly right. When the prodigal son was sitting there hungry, staring at the pig food, that was a grace from God. Whenever God brings us to the end of ourselves, a drunk says to himself, I have a drinking problem.

That is the grace of repentance. And we are being confronted, I think, and God is frankly rubbing our nose in it. We are being confronted with our inability to govern ourselves without reference to a transcendent or transcendental definition of righteousness.

We require an anchor outside this world and we cannot function untethered from that transcendental reality without veering into all the stuff that we've veered into.

Yeah, and what I've been sort of surprised by is the resiliency of most of society at this point to allow for everything that's going on to this point. I mean, we're full blown head deep into the pig trough to go back to the prodigal son narrative.

And we haven't yet, I don't think, hit rock bottom.

Yeah, I think that a lot of, I think the process has started, but I don't think we're there yet, right.

The Great Commission and the Whole Counsel of God

Wow, now, we talked about the biblical case a little bit. We went to the Great Commission. Sort of expand upon that and sort of give me a biblical case for why it's such an important work for us as Christians to Christianize the world, starting with the Great Commission, but that sort of opens up to an entire world of different biblical points that Jesus is making.

Like for instance, when he says, "'Teach them to obey everything that I've commanded.'". Well, that's certainly not just Matthew 28, 18 through 20. That means not just, that means all the gospels, and I think it means the whole Bible.

So what would you say is the biblical case for this?

Well, the biblical case for it is that Jesus told us to do it, right? So everything else is detail. So Paul says to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20, that I did not refrain from teaching you the whole counsel of God, right?

And that's the phrase I think that we ought to be thinking about. Genesis to Revelation, Jesus, everything Jesus commanded, so that's all four gospels, and that's the teaching of the apostles as well, because Jesus said, if they listen to me, they're gonna listen to you, the two go together.

So there's the New Testament. And then Jesus also teaches us how to think about the Old Testament. Scripture cannot be broken. You set aside the word of God for the sake of your tradition. Moses says this, you say that.

So Jesus teaches us to receive the Old Testament as the word of God. Jesus speaks himself the words of God, and Jesus teaches us to listen to his apostles. So there you have Genesis to Revelation, the whole counsel of God.

And I don't know if I'm supposed to disciple the nations, teaching them obedience, I don't know where to go other than the Bible. Right? Right. The Bible is, as a recent book said it, is the book that made our world.

And I think it can remake our world again, but we have to have faith in it, and we have to study it, and we have to ransack it, frankly. Yeah.

Yeah, amen. Okay, so we've got sort of a vision developing here with mere Christendom that as Christians, we ought to disciple the nations. That's commanded, that's a good work, and that will bring blessings, actually, to the world, as opposed to what the accusations are that that will be tyrannical or Ayatollah, like you said earlier.

It actually will bless the nations when we disciple the nations. What is something that the average Christian can do, and you said we're currently in the decline phase, so in the declining years of the American empire and of other nations and secularism and all these things, what are some things the average Christian can do to live out Jesus's vision of making the world a Christian place?

If you want to make a good omelet, everything starts with the eggs.

So I would say to the average Christian, be a good egg. Love your wife, respect your husband, bring up your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Get your kids out of the government school.

Find a Bible-preaching, Bible-believing church, join it, and support it. Basically, you're not responsible to fix the world. You're simply responsible to bring everything into order within your reach.

You know, what do you have authority for, authority over? Do that and wait on the Lord for the rest. So that's what I think, and God is the one who has to move and quicken the hearts of the masses of men.

That has to happen.

We can't do it. Yeah. One of the things that we talk about at church here, at the Shepherd's Church in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, is a recovery of biblical manhood, womanhood, and the family because the vast majority of your kingdom work, I believe, is going to be done within the walls of your home.

What would you say to that? Do you think that that's right? And then if it is, how do we do that well?

Biblical Manhood, Womanhood, and the Home

Amen. I would say that that's absolutely the case. And this is why, incidentally, in the ministry here in Moscow, we've done more than our share of cultural engagement stuff. You know, I've written books on culture and politics and whatnot, but I've been, I would say the heavy emphasis of what we've done here has been on marriage, family, education, education of your own children.

And so that's what we've been emphasizing in building our Christian community here. I'm fond of saying this, but when people refer to culture war, well, in a naval war, you can't have a naval war without ships.

You can't have tank warfare without tanks. You can't have culture war unless we have a culture. Yeah. All right, and culture starts in the home. Basically, biblical subcultures, biblical ways of doing things have to be hammered out around the dinner table.

It's not gonna come from big fat books written by theologians from on high. They come in and supplement and help reinforce things. But the real work, the trench work, is done by moms and dads. And pastors who preach the word to moms and dads every week.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's so funny how I think we can forget the little things, the means of grace that are so important. I know growing up, family worship, I'd never even heard of the term. I didn't hear about the word catechism until I actually got to seminary, which was crazy to me.

My class, I had a class on spiritual formation and it got changed to catechetical work because the professor left the seminary. And anyway, and I was just like, man, this is gonna be a real drag. And I ended up loving it.

I wrote a paper on the Heidelberg Catechism. Now I lead my children through the Westminster Confession, or Westminster Shorter. Shorter, yeah. And that work of just inculcating those things into my children is so important to me and my family.

We've seen it bear so much fruit. That's one of the things that we're working on is trying to help families realize the importance of family worship. Why do you think it is though, that it seems to be that most Christians will either go to the side of, well, this is too big, I can't do anything, or maybe overly political.

We've seen that with the Trump Christians. And I voted for Trump, but at the same time, I don't believe Trump is our savior. So why is it that we tend to as people forget those small things, and we try to hit home runs in other ways?

It's like Christians have got their car ran out of gas, and they're by the side of the road, and they walk back a mile or two, and someone gives them a gas can full of gas, and they say, this is too heavy.

People are looking at the things that we're talking about as burdens to carry instead of resources to make it go. Wow, that's good. Christian education is not a burden to carry. Yeah, you do have to carry the gas can, but if you carry the gas can, you're gonna get way more energy out of that than if you just declined to carry it.

So Christians have to start thinking about all of these things that Christ calls us to do as being him making resources available. All right, and that's his mercy. That's grace being extended to us. We don't deserve to have these resources, but they're there.

We have enormous privileges being given to us. The fact that you and I can, I'm in Idaho, and you're in Massachusetts, and the fact that we can talk like this is a resource. It's amazing.

Yeah, I remember hearing, I don't know where you said this, but I heard somebody quote you as to say that, what was it? Christians would have invented AI sooner if, can you finish? What was it that you said?

I forget, I forget. But I recognize I said something like that, yeah. Yeah.

You know, I'd share a story with you. I went to the gym the other day, and I was talking to a young man, a very, very fit young man, and he asked me what my job was. I said, well, I'm a pastor. And he said, well, I haven't been to the church in a while.

It just seems like a bunch of women, and the men who are there are basically women anyway. That's essentially what he said. And I feel like that that's probably a common view that the church is not a masculine, strong, rooted in deep conviction entity now.

We have sort of the nice guy mentality. What would you say as far as the opportunity that we have right now to not rebrand, but to demonstrate that Christ actually has given us a very robust gospel that is both good for men and women?

Right.

I think we can't really do this without thinking through a very serious repentance, okay? There's a book I read a number of years ago, The Church Impotent by Leon Podlas, very good book. And he asks, why is it that in the West, Western Europe, United States, England, why is it that in the West, the church is predominantly feminine?

And in the South, American South, all the churches are run by three women and the pastor. And you've got this taunt by, like the man you were talking to, the young man you were talking to, well, church is for little old ladies of both sexes, okay?

Where did that come from? And Podlas argues, interestingly, and this is a fascinating thesis, he kind of lays the whole thing at the feet of Bernard of Clairvaux. Because he says, it's not that religion is necessarily feminine, because that's not the case, this disparity between the sexes, it's not the case with Jews, it's not the case with Muslims, it's not the case with Eastern Orthodox.

But in the West, Roman Catholics and Protestants, this is a tendency that the West veers toward. And Podlas argues that the piety of the church collectively is the church is the bride of Christ. Okay, so that's a feminine image.

But half of the feminine bride is male, masculine. And that works fine, it's a scriptural image that works fine as long as we're thinking in corporate categories. So when the congregation gathers together and worships and the whole congregation thinks of herself as feminine, responding to the bridegroom, that's fine.

But what Bernard of Clairvaux did was he radically individualized corporate piety. So corporate devotional imagery was sort of brought down onto an individual level, which meant that when someone was at their prayers, when someone was praying, as instructed by Bernard of Clairvaux, they were praying as though they were a bride preparing herself for a wedding day.

Okay, well, the women can do that. Okay, and when you come to the men, one of two things will happen. Either the man says, I'm out of here. This is too soppy for me, or this is too sentimental for me, or this is, oh, you know.

So one problem is the men are no good at it and they bail. The other problem is you identify those men who are good at it, and that's another problem. And they become the leaders. And they become the leaders.

So this, basically, I think we have to emphasize the femininity of the church and detach our corporate devotion as the church from how we worship individually. What should our devotions look like? Men reading their Bibles should do so as men.

Women reading their Bibles should do so as women. Children the same. So basically, we have to recover sort of a definition of what Protestant masculinity looks like. Because it's been in abeyance for a number of centuries.

Yeah, so really just clearing up the category error, because we can't apply our individual spirituality to a corporate metaphor. We need to understand what it means to be corporately the bride, but also individually be a man.

A man who is, God said it's very good that you're a man. So that is great. Now, we don't have a ton of time left. I could talk to you probably for hours about all kinds of things. And that would be a wonderful thing to do.

But if you could sketch out a vision for what mere Christendom will look like. And what are the signs? What are the markers? What are the, as you're driving down the highway, you've got the road signs 400 miles to Moscow.

And how do we see that we're making progress with this?

Signs of Progress Toward Mere Christendom

Okay, so one of the, this is gonna sound funny, but one of the great encouragements that I, one of the things I take encouragement from is that in the long run, stupidity never works, right? You can do things for a time that's, there's a way that seems right unto a man, but the end there of his death.

So the things that we're doing to borrow language from the environmentalists, the whole training movement is not sustainable. Killing your own children is not sustainable. Same-sex mirage is not sustainable.

You cannot, you can't say Congress passed a law that we can make bread without gluten and have the loaf hold together. Or we can, we are now required to build bricks, brick walls without any mortar. Well, no, no, at some point, your wall is going to come tumbling down.

It just, so basically I see the disarray and the disintegration of a once proud secularist nation as being a very great grace from God. God, it's like God's flicking us on the forehead saying, stupidity doesn't work.

Why will you die, O house of Israel? Turn to me, use my name, call on my name. And so that's one thing. The other thing is Americans are short-term thinkers because our country isn't that old. Americans, the joke is that Americans think that a hundred years is a long time and Englishmen think that a hundred miles is a long way.

So we, Americans think that Sears Roebuck is old, right? And I was, we were just in Oxford a few months ago and there's a pizza joint in Oxford that is in a building that was built in the 1300s. Wow. And anything, huh, okay.

So because we have such short range thinking because our nation is so young, we look at the, when you're reading the book of Judges, for example, you see the people get in trouble, they're worshiping idols, God sends the Midianites, the people cry out to the Lord, God delivers them, you turn the page, they're back to worshiping idols.

And we say, what's wrong with you? Why can't you stay focused? But it doesn't dawn on us that that one page, that one turn of the page is the entire history of our nation. Wow. Okay, so, and we did it pretty quick.

Wow, that's a great point. So we have to understand that what we're going through is not a novelty. What we're going through is something that human beings have always struggled with and God is the one who delivers and he loves to deliver repentant sinners.

So the encouragement is that repentance, the door of repentance is always open.

One of the, what I think is one of the devil's craftiest strategies inbred into the church is this idea of dispensational defeatism. I think it works, it's worked against so many different people actually living a vibrant Christian life for trading it in for some sort of eschatological escapism.

And it's reading your writings and studying others. It's occurred to me how much stronger and more robust the eschatology of secularism was or is than the modern day defeatists were waiting on the Willy Wonka Vader to take us out of here.

How do we as pastors, how do we encourage people that these are actually graces from God. Seeing the current moment collapse is not evidence of an imminent rapture but it's actually evidence of God's grace and we should get our shovels and get ready to rebuild?

Postmillennial Hope Versus Dispensational Defeatism

Yeah, I would recommend the study of eschatology and of course I'm post-millennial which is historically optimistic and I would just encourage Christians who are tempted to despair to open up a study of post-millennial eschatology.

Yeah, amen. Brother, where can we find you? What are some other things that you're working on? What are some,. I've read your book on Revelation which I thought was great when the man comes around. That's a good intro to the study of Revelation at least.

What are some other things that we can check out that you're doing, that you're working on that would help us in the fight to build mere Christendom?

So the best way, we structured it this way on purpose. If people go to my blog, which the name of it is blogandmayblog and the address is all lowercase dougwills .com. So if they go to dougwills .com, they'll land on blogandmayblog and there if they just scroll down, there's a portal to pretty much everything I'm involved with.

Awesome. So New St. Andrew's College or Logos School or ACCS, which is the Classical Christian School Association, Canon Press and so on. So there's a portal to pretty much everything I'm doing, including new books and titles and whatnot.

Yeah, well, amen, brother. Listen, I want to thank you so much.

Again, we could talk about so much, but I want to thank you for the time that you've given us this morning and for just sketching out that optimistic vision of Christ's kingdom continuing to advance. It is the mustard seed that's going to take over the whole garden.

It's the rock that's going to cover all the world. It's going to be God's glory that covers every square inch of the earth, like the water covers the sea. And I thank you for sharing that with us and for telling us how we can get involved.

I hope to see you when I come out to council. Yeah, very good. Yeah, this year, looking forward to that. And thank you so much, brother. We will talk to you again soon. Thank you, God bless. God bless you.

Thank you so much for listening to this special episode of the broadcast. As Pastor Wilson was teaching us, let us all labor for all of Christ to pervade all aspects of our lives. Let us begin in our homes.

Let us be the kind of men that bring glory and honor to Jesus, the kind of women who will nurture, educate and populate Christendom 2 .0. Let us all, wherever God has called us, labor to the glory of God for the advancement of Jesus's kingdom until all dominion, rule and authority is put decisively under King Jesus's feet.

The world around us is collapsing right now. But, dear believer, be of good cheer. Do not pack your bags for an imminent rapture or check out or put your faith on the shelf or try to live a private life.

No, grab your hammer and your shovel because we have a lot of work to do. Until next time, may the Lord richly bless you and we'll see you again next time on the broadcast.