January 26, 2017 Show with Kevin Swanson on “Apostate: The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming.

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 26th day of January 2016,

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I'm sorry, 2017 and I am so delighted that we are going to be having for the very first time on Iron Sharpens Iron today

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Kevin Swanson. He is director of Generations, a ministry founded to strengthen homeschool families around the country and he is host of the daily radio program

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Generations Radio, the world's largest homeschooling and biblical worldview program that reaches families across the

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U .S. and in over 100 countries. He's also the executive director of Christian Home Educators of Colorado, the author of Freedom, Upgrade 10

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Secrets to the Best Education for Your Child, the Family Bible Study Guide Series, and others, and a teaching elder at Reformation Church, which is a congregation within the

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Orthodox Presbyterian denomination of Elizabeth, Colorado, and today we are going to be addressing a very controversial book he has written,

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Apostate, the Men Who Destroyed the Christian West, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, Kevin Swanson.

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Thanks, Chris, it's good to be with you today. And I want to let you know, Kevin, that we already have a listener who chimed in from Indianapolis, Indiana, who had the privilege of hearing you preach at the church where she is a member,

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Erin of Indianapolis, Indiana, said that she was so delighted that you are on the program because you have blessed the congregation, the

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Free Presbyterian Church of North America congregation that she is a member of in Indianapolis at a conference that they had some time ago.

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Yeah, I remember the conference, yeah, good folks up there in that neck of the woods. And that's the

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Reforming Families conference that they have there, and she gave a website for that, reformingfamilies .org,

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if anybody wants to find out about more conferences. But Kevin, before we even go into your congregation where you're an elder and the topic at hand,

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I want to hear something about your own personal background. What was the religious upbringing you had as a child, if any, and what were the providential circumstances our

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Sovereign Lord used to draw you to Himself and really not only breathe new life into you, give you a new heart, but also draw you to embrace the doctrines of sovereign grace that we call

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Reformed Theology or Calvinism? Yeah, Chris, I was raised in the mission field in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s.

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My dad and my mom were homeschooling us out there, six of us, and right around 1973 -74, my dad came upon the sermons of Al Martin, and we spent a lot of time out in our little house on that island of Kyushu, listening to sermons from Al Martin.

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I remember coming into the conviction of the Holy Spirit, realizing I was a sinner and I needed desperately the atoning work of Jesus Christ for me.

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So it was right around that time, I think, 11, 12, 13 years of age, that I was assured of my salvation in Christ.

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Since then, I've continued to grow and engage in ministry and so forth, and now

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I'm a pastor in an Orthodox Presbyterian church out here in Elizabeth, Colorado. So I guess that's the short story, but yeah, influenced strongly by the

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Reformed Baptist movement, Al Martin, Walt Chantry, some of those guys in the 1970s, and it really had a profound effect on me.

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I'd say Martin Lloyd -Jones also, his work has always been important to me, too. Well, providentially,

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I happen to be a member of the church where Walt Chantry used to be the pastor. Ah, that's interesting.

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All right. Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He was the pastor there for 40 years.

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He had retired before I got there, because I only moved to Carlisle four, or should

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I say five years ago, but I have interviewed

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Walt on my program at least twice and have fellowshiped with him, and he's a dear brother in Christ.

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Well, I think it was so important that guys like Walt Chantry, Al Martin, and others restored the sovereignty of God over all things, especially the area of superiority or salvation.

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It was absolutely crucial in the humanist age that we once again come back to the centrality of God and the sovereignty of God over all areas of life, even over the expression of the human will, and that's an affront to humanists.

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Sadly, humanism took over most of the Christian church through most of the 20th century, but there was a comeback that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, and I'm so thankful that some of these men were in the forefront of that battle.

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Yes, as am I, and I thank God that when

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I became a born -again believer, coming out of Roman Catholicism, I am so thankful that the church where I actually was baptized and became a member for the first time as a born -again believer was a

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Reformed Baptist church, or a church that taught the doctrines of sovereign grace. I didn't have to go through years of being taught wrongly in a heretical church or a less -than -biblically -sound church, and I just thank

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God for the Reformed roots that I have as an evangelical, and that these things are precious to me, and have been for quite some time, although initially,

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I must admit, when I first heard them, I hated these teachings. But when someone gave me the booklet,

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George Whitfield's Letters to John Wesley on Election, that was reprinted by the

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Chapel Library, I read that booklet. I said, oh no, this is true, but I hate it, but then within about a month,

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I fell in love with the doctrines, and have been in love with them ever since. And the

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Orthodox Presbyterian denomination that you are a part of, that was born out of the

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Fundamentalist -Modernist controversy. Right. I know that Dr. J.

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Gresham Machen is one of the pillars and founders of that denomination. Tell us something a little bit about that.

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Well, J. Gresham Machen was a stalwart for the conservative biblical faith in the 1920s and 1930s, and it was a gift of God that he allowed for, and ordained that some of these men would come forward and sustain something of the

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Christian faith. And of course, there were good movements going on in the Baptist world and elsewhere, but the

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Presbyterian world is largely taken by liberals in the 1920s and 1930s. When we say liberals, people undermine the inspiration of Scripture, the authority of Scripture, and the sufficiency of Christ in salvation, his atoning work.

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And that was a major battle in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church emerged as one of the stalwarts, one of the defenders of the

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Orthodox Christian faith at that time. And to this day, they're still one of the most conservative, one of the most biblical denominations in America, as I see it.

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Yes, and I have many dear friends, as I was telling you before the program started, who are in that denomination, and one that jumps to mind immediately is the one that I've known the longest, my dear friend and brother in Christ, Bill Shishko, who is an

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Orthodox Presbyterian minister who recently retired from the pastorate in Franklin Square, and is now hosting his own radio program,

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A Visit to the Pastor Study, and is running a ministry called Reformation Metro New York, and I hope that you folks listening to Iron Sharpens Iron become regular listeners of Bill Shishko's as well.

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And this book that you have written, quite a attention -grabbing title for sure,

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Apostate, The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West. It would probably be a good way to start by defining apostate, because some might find it interesting, some of the folks that you have listed in here, because we typically think of apostates as someone who embraced and taught or proclaimed a genuine biblical,

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Orthodox, faithful creed or confession at one point, and then later abandoned it.

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But I don't know if you're using it in the same way, or if you have a different way of using the term apostate for these folks that you've included in here.

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Well, the leaders of the Western world, the philosophers that have led the thinking and the direction of the

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Western world that's influenced most of the educational institutions or political or social institutions, came out of Christian backgrounds.

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Bottom line, not all of them had a

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Christian profession themselves. They had Christian fathers, they had Christian grandfathers, some were stronger in terms of Orthodoxy than others, some came out of a

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Lutheran background, some out of a Baptist background, some Presbyterian, some Anglican, and so forth.

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But you take something like John Paul Sartre, who was raised in a household that was largely apostate, that is, it already turned away from the faith.

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But he was the prodigy of six or seven generations of Protestant pastors in France.

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So, you know, his background had strong Christian influence, it's just he made a hard left out of that.

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And then others were baptized into the Lutheran church, like Nietzsche, son of a Lutheran pastor. Or you take

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Karl Marx, who was also baptized into a Lutheran church. But these guys became some of the most powerful, most influential atheists of all time.

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And you have some folks included in this book that also might puzzle some or surprise some.

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Let's start with Thomas Aquinas. There are even, as you know, and I'm not going to mention names, but there are well -known

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Reformed scholars, theologians, pastors who you and I know, at least we know of them, and who embraced

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Thomas Aquinas as a great hero of the faith. He was a teacher in the Catholic church before it was really a full -blown

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Roman Catholicism. There are many things that the Church of Rome declared at the Council of Trent that Thomas Aquinas would have found heretical.

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But what is it specifically about Thomas Aquinas where you lay the charge at his feet as being one of the men who destroyed the

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Christian West? Well, I think what people need to ask themselves is, how in the world did we turn towards humanism?

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How did the man -centric way of thinking of epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics eventually develop in the

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Western world, especially if there was a strong Christian influence? How did it influence most of the universities?

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Why have the universities inevitably gone the way of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, on and on?

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Every single university, almost, has been a Christian seminary at the beginning, and then it turns into the most anti -Christian, anti -God -persecuting force against Christians you could ever imagine.

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So, you know, inquiring people want to know, you know, we want to know how did this happen? And so it's good to ask that question.

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And, of course, the reason is because there is a faulty epistemology in Western learning,

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Western education, a Western view of knowledge that comes from Aquinas. And now Aquinas, towards the end of his life, does admit that all his work is straw.

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So I give a possibility that Aquinas might have been a believer. I don't know for sure.

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Of course, I don't know any of these people towards the end of their lives where they went, but their trajectory was not good for the most part.

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And Aquinas' efforts to defend Aristotle and to allow for a distinction between philosophical knowledge built up on human reason and sacred knowledge as two forms of knowledge was devastating to the modern university, to the

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Christian world. That was the point at which everything goes south and the

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Christian world is utterly destroyed, at least that part of it that is plugged into the universities and seminaries.

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Now, perhaps before we go on with some of these other figures, perhaps you could describe a little bit more in detail what you mean by the destruction of the

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West. Well, it's the destruction of the institutions that at one point had a fairly strong Christian foundation.

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Now, part of that does happen during the breakdown of the Catholic religion and the growth of the papacy, the strengthening of the papacy, and the influence of the

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Renaissance. So it doesn't all happen with the Enlightenment. The roots of it are way back in the 1300s and 1400s.

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The roots of it, as I see it, are with Thomas Aquinas and his separation of sacred knowledge and philosophical knowledge built up on human reason unaided by Scripture.

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And so the separation of those knowledges was really the point at which there's a departure from the

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Christian faith. And, of course, almost every university is affected by that, if not every university at some point, because there isn't this epistemological base upon which thinking is rooted in Scripture.

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Rather, we're always moving towards Aristotelian ethics or Platonic ethics. Think about Harvard University.

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That starts out as a seminary, but before long it's Latitudinarians that take over in the 1690s, and they're borrowing from Aristotelian ethics and Platonic ethics.

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Guys like Increase Mather are working very hard to try to bring biblical ethics and biblical truth back in, but he loses the battle by about 1704.

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So that's, of course, the end of Harvard College. So, inevitably, the colleges move in the wrong direction.

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Why? Because of Aquinas. Because the epistemological base of it assumes that you can always build up a view of life, of philosophy on the basis of human reason, unaided by Scripture.

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And that's the point at which we see massive departure, and it's hard to find a single college or a single university that was salvaged over a period of, say, 600 or 700 years.

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Well, now I'm even regretting even more having the name Aquinas as my confirmation name when

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I was a Catholic, but I repudiated the whole system anyway.

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Well, and it didn't help that he systematized the Catholic system of merit.

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I don't think that helped the Christian faith at all. I think that set the direction for a

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Catholicism that eventually completely jettisoned any notion of justification by faith alone.

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I don't want to belabor Thomas Aquinas, but very briefly, what do you think the attraction is for some

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Reformed scholars and theologians? You know, it's really hard to say. I think everybody wants to assume the best, and any time somebody shows up with sort of a negative book like this, which is a huge expose on even guys like Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, John Locke, you know, people who are supposed to be adored by the

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Christian liberal arts departments in colleges around America, but I think somebody's got to show up and really put the line of antithesis and thesis down.

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We have to identify the line between the world and Christ, and it's the academics that are afraid to do that, because they've been somewhat taken by these great writers.

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And typically, people think, you know, great thinkers, great writers, great philosophers are always good.

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So if it's good writing, it's going to be—if there's great writing involved, these guys are great minds, they're putting together words and sentences and using terms of phrases that are most amazing they've ever seen, it's got to be good.

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Well, the devil is a good writer. The devil's a good thinker. The devil's a good philosopher.

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But that's the point at which Christians are taken by these literary giants, and the faith of succeeding generations of kids who go to these liberal arts universities are destroyed.

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And it happens again and again, generation after generation, and my book is an attempt to put a stop to that.

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Now, tell us something about why you included René Descartes, a humanist philosopher, in this series of men.

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Well, René Descartes and John Locke are attempting to put together an epistemology, a theory of truth, unaided by God, unaided by God's Word, without having to rely on God's revelations.

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And so, René Descartes attempts to do it by rationalism, and John Locke attempts it by empiricism.

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And they both are trying to develop an epistemology built up on human reason, unaided by sacred doctrine.

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They're trying to obey Thomas Aquinas, but that's the root of departure.

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That's the foundation point at which these men are going the wrong direction, and pretending like man can create his system of knowledge without God, with his own mind.

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And that's what we would call autonomy. That's thinking apart from God's thoughts.

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And that's a dangerous thing to do. Of course, that's where all human pride begins.

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That's where the autonomous humanist knowledge begins in these modern universities.

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So, these are the beginnings. These are the beginnings of a departure into the humanist enlightenment, and that's how we get to guys like Nietzsche, Jean -Paul

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Sartre, and the others in the late 19th century. So, you obviously believe that these men, also

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Jean -Jacques Rousseau and Jeremy Bentham, that they would have a lot more influence in our modern culture than any of us realize, because most of us don't even really know who these men were.

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Yeah, that's the most amazing thing. But guys like Jean -Jacques Rousseau, by far the strongest influence on Karl Marx, Hegel as well, but Jean -Jacques

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Rousseau is very influential in the thinking, the political thinking of the modern Marxists and Socialists.

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How do you get to governments that aren't taking more than 3 -4 % of the national income in the 1700s to governments that control 60 -70 % of the gross national income today?

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Our massive tyrannies that control all education, all health care, just about every area of life were established through guys like Jean -Jacques

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Rousseau, who deified the state and departed from a Christian viewpoint of civil government.

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So that's just one example. Jean -Jacques Rousseau is also a father of modern education. John Dewey, the modern father, looked to Jean -Jacques

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Rousseau as his grandfather, as the one who had the most influence upon him.

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And so you look around and say, well, how do you get to all these secular schools? How do you get to status control of education?

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Jean -Jacques Rousseau proposed it. There were no compulsory tennis laws in the history of mankind, with maybe a few exceptions.

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One exception at the fall of Jerusalem for about two or three years. As Jerusalem turned into a hellhole, they tried something of a compulsory tennis law.

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But it was Jean -Jacques Rousseau, and it was the Prussians that took it up. But these were the men that came upon the idea of government -funded education and a monolithic form of thinking imposed upon the masses by the civil government.

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And so that's how you get to the modern state. That's how you get to a secularized form of education. And that's how you get a compulsory tennis law.

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Now, today, everybody says, well, we take that for granted. That's the way it's supposed to be. We're all supposed to be raised in tyrannies.

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We're all supposed to be tyrannized, and our systems of knowledge are supposed to be set by humanist secular governments.

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That's just the way it's supposed to be. Well, no, that's not the way it's supposed to be. You get back to Scripture, you're going to find that's not

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God's ordained method of raising the next generation. Rather, that's the doctrinaire of these men who were influenced by, in many cases, by Satan himself to bring about massive changes in the modern world, and eventually the massive apostasies that develop in Europe and England, in America as well, where church attendance is dropping from 40, 50 percent down to 2 to 3 percent.

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And you're selling off your churches to Muslim mosques. So how does that happen? It comes about by these very powerful ideologues of the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries.

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And they become the pastors. They become the religious leaders of the day, largely through the universities.

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And that's how you get a secularized society. Now, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the historic

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Unitarian minister, some conservatives might readily see why you would include any

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Unitarian in this list, because of the way they look at Unitarians and Universalists today, who have merged together.

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They're very liberal and leftist, typically. But even back in the 19th century, was this—obviously, it's a heretical group, the

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Unitarians, but were they that much of a negative influence back even then in the 19th century?

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Oh, yes. The Unitarians were very influential in the North, and I think they led the apostasy in America.

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You ask, well, why is the Northeast the most liberal, the most godless part of the

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United States, with maybe the exception of California? The reason is because of the massive apostasies that were going on at Harvard University that eventually affected the line of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

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His father and grandfather were right there at the forefront of, you know, let's abandon the faith, let's abandon the

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Trinitarian faith, let's turn towards Unitarianism. So his grandparents and parents were on that track.

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And then you get to him, who's a transcendentalist, sort of a New Age, Eastern mystic, and becomes extremely influential, actually, over Harvard College as well during the 19th century.

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Now, you've already mentioned Karl Marx, but obviously he would be a primary figure that all

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Christians, or should I say most Christians, should view as a dangerous influence on the world that still, sadly and tragically, has the ripple effect going on today, even in our last election where we had a socialist,

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Bernie Sanders, nearly winning the Democratic primaries, and of course the woman that he was running against was really a socialist, but just less honest about it.

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But if you could comment on Karl Marx. Well, the most influential men on modern society today, at least in the minds of most, are probably going to be

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Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. Charles Darwin in the sense of how people view themselves and the world and how education is presented, and then

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Karl Marx in terms of how the world runs and the systems that run our governments today.

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Most of our governments are run by the concept of redistribution of the wealth. That's why graduate income tax, that's why public education, all these things were planks in the

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Communist Manifesto. So I go through the Communist Manifesto in the book, actually, and just work through plank by plank and point out how it's basically been accomplished in most of our nations, including the

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United States. We are about as communist as Karl Marx had proposed that we should be in the

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Communist Manifesto. I'm sure he would like us to progress a little further down that track. But there's been huge, huge progress in the development of the

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Communist vision, and Karl Marx is right at the forefront of that. He's the one who is the father of the purges, the hundreds of millions of people that were killed through bloody purges in the 20th century.

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And what's interesting also about guys like Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche and a few others is they tend to refer to Satan or Apollyon or Beelzebub in their writings.

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So as Christians, we are quite aware of the spiritual forces that work in very evil men.

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It's very possible that Karl Marx was influenced by Satan himself. He seems to indicate that in his prose and poems, and I point that out in the chapter on Karl Marx.

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So when you said that they mentioned Satan and the devil, they were mentioning him favorably.

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Oh, yes. Oh, yes, as the one who has influenced him. He called himself Apollyon or the destroyer.

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So he aligned himself with Satan. It's possible at points he was possessed by Satan himself, which would not surprise me at all if Satan exists.

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And we as Christians believe he exists. And if Satan is the author of all evil, and if anybody considers the mass slaughter of hundreds of millions of people, if not billions of people in the 20th century, and the slaughter of tens of millions of Christians as perhaps the work of the devil, then

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I think it shouldn't surprise them at all that a guy like Karl Marx would profess to have been possessed by Satan himself.

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We are going to our first station break. If you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Kevin Swanson on his book,

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Apostate, the Men Who Destroyed the Christian West, you can send us an email at chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us at least your first name, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

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USA. Don't go away. We will be right back with Kevin Swanson right after these messages.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours, with about 90 minutes to go, is

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Kevin Swanson. We are discussing his book, Apostate, The Men Who Destroyed the

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Christian West. Our email address, if you'd like to join us with a question, is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

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chrisarnzen at gmail .com. And we do have a listener, Toni in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

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She says, I appreciate your guest today so much. After a very troubling church plant experience,

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I set out to find out what in the world is going on in the church. I could not have been prepared for what

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I found. I agree wholly with your guest on Thomas Aquinas, and I believe him to be one of those who crept in unawares, as is warned about in Jude 1 .4.

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Unawares meaning cleverly deceptive. Could you please ask Kevin if he is familiar with John W.

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Robbins of the Trinity Foundation? I have benefited so much from his lectures at trinityfoundation .org.

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He goes into a great deal on the dangers of Aquinas and many others. Gordon H. Clark's lectures are also found on this site and are wonderful too.

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Well, obviously, that was a very controversial modern figure, John Robbins, who went home to be with the

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Lord not long ago, who got people upset on all sides of issues.

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But if you could answer as best you can. You know, there were some great reformers in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s.

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I think of Gordon Clark, who was the mentor for John Robbins. I think of Cornelius Van Till.

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I think of Francis Schaeffer. Even today, John Frame, all of these guys had concerns about Thomas Aquinas.

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John Frame's recent theology or history of Western philosophy is pretty fair in his assessment of what's happening with Aquinas and his influence on the success of 600 -700 years of Western history.

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I'm not the only guy talking about these things, thankfully. There have been some great men of God who have really tried to lay out the antithesis and present a thesis as well.

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I think one of the challenges with doing this, Chris, is that sometimes we can be perceived as extreme negative.

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We're very good at cutting down the deets of the Nicolaitans, which Jesus hates as well, but we're losing our first love, and we tend to be a little grumpy around the edges, not a lot of joy in the

36:11

Holy Spirit, you know. So I think it's important for us, when we critique the world and worldly thinking, that we present the thesis against the antithesis.

36:22

That, of course, is the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of God's interpretation of ourselves, of history, of redemption.

36:30

Let's be sure that we're not stuck in antithesis constantly, or stuck in controversies on fairly minor things with our brothers and sisters.

36:38

What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to lay out as best as I can the line between Christ and the world.

36:45

I think it's important for us not to get all worked up in how much water to use in a baptism, and then split our churches ad infinitum all the way to the end, until there's nobody left except my wife and myself,

36:57

I'm not sure about. That's a really bad way to handle the faith.

37:03

Yet, on the other hand, let's be sure we can draw a distinction between the world and Christ, and avoid that which is worldly, that which is based in humanism, that which is opposed to God's word and to our

37:20

Lord Jesus Christ. Let's be sure that we're hating the world and loving our brother.

37:25

One of the challenges that happens to many Christians in many Christian churches is they wind up doing just the opposite.

37:31

They wind up loving the world, they love everything coming out of Hollywood and Nashville, they love everything about the public schools, they love everything about Friedrich Nietzsche or John Paul I, but they hate their brother, and they have a hard time getting along with their brother.

37:45

So as Christians, let's be sure we get that straight. Yeah, amen.

37:50

And John Robbins, although I have appreciated some of the things that they have printed, especially those things that they have brought back into print from the 19th century and before,

38:01

I did take really considerable objection to some of the things that he has said about some great men of God like Charles Spurgeon and things like that.

38:15

He seemed to be very quick with the trigger finger on identifying somebody as an Arminian if they disagreed with him on nearly anything in regard to evangelism and so on.

38:28

Yeah, well, we've got to be careful that we're not straining at gnats and swallowing camels.

38:34

Let's distinguish our gnats and camels. That's hard to do. It requires great faith, wisdom, and character to get that straight.

38:41

And as a pastor, I'll tell you, it's a constant battle within myself that I'm distinguishing the dragons and the fleas.

38:50

Let's not be slapping fleas on each other's backs while the dragons are burning down the villages.

38:56

Amen. And of course, John is in glory now with Christ, so those things have been straightened out with him as far as those things are concerned.

39:05

And thank you so much, Tony. And guess what, Tony? If you give me your full mailing address, you have won a free copy of this book,

39:13

Apostate, The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West. This is no lightweight, cheap paperback here.

39:19

This is a gorgeous hardback book, a really thick volume of well over 300—it's 310 pages, 311 pages long.

39:32

Quite a substantial work that we have here by our guest, and thanks to him and Generations, the ministry that he represents, we are able to give this to you today for submitting a question, so please give us your full mailing address.

39:49

We have another listener in Slovenia, the homeland of our new

39:56

First Lady. He says, this is Joe in Slovenia, Brother Chris, please ask

40:03

Brother Swanson to comment on the socialist nature of Christian denominations that collect funds from individual local churches that are then controlled by bodies of denominational elites who spend those funds without oversight by the believers and churches from which they came.

40:22

How did we get here? Thank you for this amazing topic. Are you sure?

40:28

I'm not exactly sure what he's talking about, do you? You know, I would say that we have to be cautious that we're not developing a centralized approach to things.

40:38

You know, the idea of centralized governments and centralized control and centralized control of welfare and such really came in the modern age.

40:48

It came through Karl Marx and others, the whole idea of redistribution of the wealth came that way.

40:54

And I think the biblical approach has always been a fairly decentralized approach to power, and when denominations become increasingly centralized and control of monies to the point of tens of millions and hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, are controlled at the top of a very, very centralized system, a

41:16

Babel -like system, I think we're getting beyond what the kingdom of God is all about.

41:23

I advocate, generally, a decentralized approach to governments, a decentralized approach to church government as well, which still involves some degree of connection and accountability,

41:39

I believe all that, that's important. But let's be very cautious not to go the way of the world, and with this centralizing instinct, which is very strong in the minds and hearts of men.

41:49

And of course, it comes through the ideology of guys like Karl Marx, and the Democratic Party tends to be a little more centrist, always wanting to centralize control of everything under the federal government, whereas conservatives understand that centralized power is not healthy for man, and so, especially those of us who have a healthy respect for the depravity of the human mind, so we want to see something of a decentralization.

42:16

I think that's the principle you want to go with. It's not to say that you can't all come together in covenant, save a little extra money as a group of churches, and fund one particular missionary.

42:26

So we're not saying that can't happen. It's just be cautious with the centrist approach.

42:34

Well, thank you, Joe, in Slovenia, and I also thank you for providing us with a

42:40

United States mailing address to ship the book that you have just won. And the book, as I've been saying, is the book by our guest

42:49

Kevin Swanson, Apostate, The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West. And thank you for your contribution to the show today by asking a very good question, and God willing, you'll be getting this wonderful book within about a week or so.

43:05

And I wanted to also take the time to apologize to all of the Iron Trump and Zion listeners who have won books within the last two to three weeks and have not yet gotten them, and perhaps a couple of Bibles here and there as well.

43:20

I have been in Atlanta, Georgia for the G3 conference and just returned very recently.

43:26

That was nearly a week long in Atlanta, Georgia. And also prior to that,

43:32

I had my own pastor's luncheon that I orchestrated and a debate here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, between a

43:39

Roman Catholic and a Reformed Baptist. So my webmaster has been involved in a lot of these activities as well.

43:47

So we both have been tied up. But God willing, over the next week or so, we should be getting all those books that have not been shipped out to you yet out in the mail.

43:59

And so thank you for your patience. Speaking of this way that professing

44:07

Christians have held in high esteem the concept of socialism, they very often appeal to Acts 2, where we have all those who had believed were together and had all things in common.

44:27

We have the people in the first century church selling all they had in order to provide for their brethren, and somehow modernists have grasped this and tried to legitimize socialism through this teaching in Acts and other places in the

44:43

Scripture. How can you differentiate between what we know as Marxism, Communism, and Socialism from what our

44:51

Lord is teaching in His Word here through Acts? Yeah, Chris, it's pretty clear, I think, in Acts 5 that the selling of the property and the redistribution of property was a function of voluntary action.

45:03

In fact, Peter actually says that's a voluntary thing that you sold it. It's voluntary that you bring the money to us.

45:09

Every step of the way, it's voluntary. Why would you lie to us or lie to the Holy Spirit? That's his argument there.

45:15

So, of course, it was a voluntary form of redistribution of wealth or charity, and that's what we advocate.

45:22

That's what we need to press for. We need to get rid of Social Security systems. We need to get rid of the public education system.

45:29

We need to get rid of the redistribution of wealth. Why? Because the Word of God is very clear that when it comes to public works and public taxation and such, the poor shall not pay less.

45:39

The rich shall not pay more. That's Exodus 30. So if you bring the principles of God's Word to bear, you're going to find that this growth of the state, this redistribution of money, this stealing that happens by the state, and the redistribution of wealth is an idea that is propounded by Karl Marx, who himself was influenced by Lucifer or Satan.

46:04

So let's go to the right source. Let's stop following the mentorship and the discipleship of this man influenced by Satan.

46:13

I would encourage Christians to go back to the Word of God and to find their ethics and their approach to life in the

46:21

Word of God, and I think that's really a huge thrust in my book. I think what happens with guys like Aquinas is he says, well, you know, sacred doctrine is good for getting you saved, but don't use it for things like, well, philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, you know, life.

46:38

Don't use it for politics. Don't use it for social systems. Let Karl Marx do that for you.

46:44

Let Friedrich Nietzsche come up with a system of psychology. Let Jean -Paul Sartre come up with a social system.

46:52

Let's let the philosophers come in and tell us how to do 99 .99999 % of life, and let's derelevantize most of the

47:01

Word of God so it no longer speaks authoritatively, ethically to how we live life.

47:07

And let's bring in Satan and all of his philosophers to set up the world and to run the world for us.

47:16

So I think as Christians, we need to really put the Word of God side by side with the Communist Manifesto.

47:22

We've got to bring the Word of God side by side with Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter or Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and that's what

47:30

I do in the book. I know it's an affront to many Christians. They can't believe we're actually using the

47:37

Word of God to equip the man of God for every good work, including the man of God in the political science classroom or the literature classroom.

47:44

But it's time to set aside this Aquinas idea of separating sacred and secular.

47:50

It's time to bring the Word of God to bear on real issues. Otherwise, we will see the continued destruction of our families, of our

47:59

Christian education systems, and our churches year by year, decade by decade, and generation by generation.

48:07

05 .20 Aaron Well, we have Aaron in Indianapolis, Indiana, who earlier emailed us to mention how pleased she was that you were my guest because she had seen you in person preaching at the congregation where she's a member there, the

48:21

Free Presbyterian Congregation. She asks, would you please ask Elder Swanson if, in his opinion, it is too late for public schools and universities to return to non -heretical teaching, or is it private schooling, homeschooling, the only hope of America returning to teaching children the truth?

48:41

05 .21 Chris, I have to say that the epistemological foundations of these public schools is rotten to the core.

48:48

I think also we've got to realize that the Word of God does not place the finance and the control of education in the church or in the state.

49:02

It places the control and funding of education right there in the hands of fathers and mothers.

49:08

It's Ephesians 6 -4, Deuteronomy 6 -7, elsewhere, and I think you can find throughout history.

49:14

I've done a little book called Keep the Faith on Education in which I went throughout 2 ,000 years of church history from the church fathers, the apostolic fathers, to the reformers, to the evangelical leaders of the 17th century and 18th centuries, and I pulled together everything

49:34

I could find on what they said about raising children and educating children. What I find is that what the church fathers and what 2 ,000 years of the wisest people have said about education is diametrically opposed to the massive socialist, totalitarian education forms that we have in our day -to -day.

49:54

So I think let's use the wisdom of 2 ,000 years of the greatest pastors, teachers, evangelical leaders in the church, and let's ask ourselves, how does that compare with the kind of education that is presented in secular universities and public schools in which the fear of God is not taught to be the beginning of knowledge and wisdom?

50:18

And if it's not, then we need to get out and get out now. Now, there may be some exceptions here and there, but the institutions themselves are rotten to the foundations if they are not teaching the beginning of knowledge is the fear of God in that science classroom, in that chemistry laboratory, or that history classroom.

50:39

So we need Christian education. We need to bring it back. I know we're slipping. We have a million less kids in Christian schools today than we'd had in the 1980s and 1990s.

50:48

We've lost a million out of some two, three million Christian kids attending Christian schools.

50:53

It's made up for somewhat by the homeschool movement, but the homeschool movement's become massively secularized in just the last eight or ten years, except for a few stalwart

51:03

Christian organizations that are still trying to bring Christians in and encourage people to a Christian home education.

51:09

So, yeah, the home education movement is massively secularized. The Christian school movement has lost a million students in the last 15 years.

51:18

We are right now barely keeping our head above water in salvaging any form of Christian education in America.

51:24

And so I say at this point, great leaders, great pastors will do everything they can to salvage something of a

51:32

Christian paideia for Christian children, whether it be Christian schools or Christian homeschools.

51:38

Aaron, thank you very much for your question. And you have also won a free copy of Apostate, the

51:43

Men Who Destroyed the Christian West by Kevin Swanson. Look out for a very large package in the mail, because this is a very impressive hardcover book that you'll be getting.

51:54

And we thank you for your question today. We have a CJ in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who wants to know, why is it that Charles Darwin was able to captivate the world with his nonsense?

52:09

It is my understanding he was not even a trained scientist. And yet today, it seems the most brilliant of scientists who reject biblical truth look down upon those who reject

52:21

Darwin as morons. Although, I have heard that there are a growing number of even secular scientists beginning to abandon his myths.

52:32

Two reasons, Chris. I think the first reason is the world was prepared for an apostasy.

52:37

They were tired of what John Dewey called 2 ,000 years of the fixed and the final, and they wanted to be released from the constraints of this

52:48

Christian world and life view that was hanging over them like a specter. And by the way,

52:55

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter brings out the same thing, complaining of 1 ,800 years at that point of the reign of Jesus Christ.

53:03

It doesn't mention his name, but it does use the term 1 ,800 years. So yes, all of these apostates,

53:09

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Darwin, they were sick of Jesus. They were sick of the influence of Christianity and the message that we are sinners, we've broken

53:22

God's laws, we need the atoning blood of Jesus Christ to cleanse us from our sins.

53:28

That message was something they had rejected in toto. And so the world wanted to live life the way they wanted to live life.

53:35

They wanted to be released from the ethical constraints of God's laws and the need for salvation and the cleansing of their sins.

53:45

They wanted to be released from that entire message. And so I think, yeah, the world, the Gentile world was beginning to move towards the

53:53

Romans 11 scenario. So that was happening in the Western world, no question.

53:59

But the second thing was that even Christians were somewhat enamored by science.

54:05

And if you were a scientist, you had that, you know, white coat coming out of laboratory with PhD on the label there, everybody stood around you and kept saying, we're not worthy, we're not worthy, we're not worthy to be in your presence.

54:21

That was the way that people viewed science in the 1700s and the 1800s.

54:27

It was the age of scientism, where if people were engaging in scientific inquiry, then you know, these were the gods, these were the high priests of modern humanism.

54:38

And what they didn't realize is that scientists are as fallible as anybody.

54:44

And if they have the wrong foundations, they have the wrong epistemological foundations, inevitably, they're going to be wandering around the wasteland of heterodoxy and falsehoods eventually.

54:55

And that's, of course, where science is going today. It's very difficult for people to distinguish now between pseudoscience and real science, because they've abandoned

55:05

God's truth. And so I think it was an overconfidence in the scientific mind of man, not realizing that all science could do is give you something of a probability.

55:16

By the time you get to John Dewey, he acknowledges it's all probability, it's all induction. And so there's no certainty whatsoever.

55:22

So we have to jettison certainty and embrace just sort of an empty pragmatism. And so, you know, you're moving towards John Dewey, you're moving towards Nietzsche in the 1800s, where we abandon all possibilities of knowing anything for certain.

55:39

And so it's just more of a nihilistic, meaningless world that we have embraced now in the 20th and 21st centuries.

55:46

But back in the 1700s, 1800s, man was optimistic. He thought he could learn about the world independent of God and develop a system of knowledge that was completely and utterly built up on human reason without any dependence upon God whatsoever.

56:02

Thank you, C .J. And you have also won the book The Apostate, or should

56:07

I say Apostate? The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West by our guest

56:12

Kevin Swanson. Thanks to Kevin and Generations who have published this massive work that we hope that you appreciate very much and make much use of.

56:25

Charlie in Carlisle, Pennsylvania wants to know, How much did evolution in Darwin's book impact racism in the

56:33

United States? Big time. I refer to that in the book. I speak of Darwin's perspective on eugenics, and of course,

56:41

Galton as well, his nephew's perspective on eugenics. And that had a huge influence upon the

56:50

Supreme Court justices of the United States that in the Buck case imposed sterilization upon a young woman because they just did not want to see this woman continue to bear children despite the fact that one child she had born was just fine.

57:12

But eugenics influenced America big time. It influenced Margaret Sanger.

57:17

But I think even more horrifically, it influenced the entire world and produced some of the most bloody purges, eugenic type of purges you could ever imagine.

57:31

If you study the history of the Aborigines in Tasmania, completely wiped out. It's one of the saddest stories in all of human history.

57:38

Or the Aborigines in Australia. If you study the history of the Phoenicians on the southern tip of Argentina, completely wiped out, largely by western whites who were convinced by Charles Darwin that these people were not human on the same scale that everybody else was.

57:57

And in fact, John G. Peyton, the great missionary to the New Hebrides, spent some time in Australia, and he was utterly sickened by the pastors that were teaching that the

58:06

Aborigines were not human and did not have the capacity, spiritual capacity, to know

58:11

God as the whites and others. So it influenced the church. It influenced political leaders.

58:16

It influenced many of the whites. And it brought about some of the most bloody, horrendous racial purges you could ever imagine.

58:24

Of course, you'd also have to refer to Charles Darwin's influence upon Nietzsche and Nietzsche's influence upon Adolf Hitler and the killings of six million

58:35

Jews. And all that's referred to in my book. Because one of the points in my book that I think is very important is what

58:41

Jesus said when he spoke of prophets. He said, you shall know them by their fruits. And so I don't just talk about their ideologies.

58:47

I talk about their lives. I talk about what they've produced. I look at their fruits. And so, you know, average, ordinary people don't have to go through all their twisted thinking.

58:58

And by the way, these people are extremely hard to read, guys like Nietzsche, very difficult to read, extremely difficult to read, unless you have 18

59:05

PhDs. But in the end, just look at their fruits. It's one of the easiest ways to know that you have some of the most horrendous people ever.

59:13

Think about Nietzsche, considered to be the grandfather of modern psychology. Came up with the name Freud and others really ultimately were rooted in Nietzsche's ideas.

59:23

Nietzsche was the original psychologist, the originator of modern psychiatry.

59:29

And yet he went completely stark raving insane the last seven years of his life after he wrote a book in which he claimed to be the

59:36

Antichrist himself. But, you know, he actually died in an asylum, didn't he?

59:43

Yeah, and it was his sister took care of him for the last seven years of his life. But that's one of the greatest ironies in all of history.

59:50

I'm not sure people understand this, that every psychology student attending every psychology class in every secular and Christian college in America needs to know that the person who came up with this field of study called psychology that they're studying in the

01:00:03

Christian college classroom was Friedrich Nietzsche. And Friedrich Nietzsche called himself the first psychologist, went stark raving insane for the last seven years of his life.

01:00:13

This is their grandfather. This is the person who stands up in front of their university college classrooms and lectures on his thinking, on his view on psychology.

01:00:26

So I think, you know, people attending Christian college and studying psychology or secular colleges studying psychology, they need to know who their prophets are.

01:00:35

They need to know their fruits, because Jesus said, by their fruits, you shall know them.

01:00:40

And that's why I wrote this book, Apostate, The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West. What I'm really trying to do is I'm trying to roll a little bit of a hand grenade into the garden party of modern secular university education, especially liberal arts education in the area of literature, psychology and so forth.

01:00:57

People need to read this book. They need to give it to any college student they know. If there's any college student in their school or any college student in their church, or maybe they have grandkids who are college kids,

01:01:10

I can give a bulk rate of six or seven dollars. If these books are going to college kids,

01:01:16

I'll mark it down to six or seven dollars to get this hardback into as many hands as I can.

01:01:22

You know, we've got to be sure that our college kids attending secular colleges and Christian colleges are well prepared and they're going to be discerning on things like epistemology, political science, psychology, social science, and so forth.

01:01:37

They need to really be rooted and grounded in a right biblical view of these things, because they're going to be studying these men in those college classrooms.

01:01:46

Well, Charlie, you have won the last copy that we have available of Apostate, The Men Who Destroyed the

01:01:52

Christian West. So thank you for contributing your question to the program. We're going to our final break right now.

01:01:58

And if anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

01:02:04

chrisarnson at gmail dot com. And we still have a number of people waiting to have their questions asked and answered.

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Don't go away. We will be right back after these messages with Kevin Swanson. Iron Sharpens Iron Radio is sponsored by Harvey Cedars, a year -round

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That's linbrookbaptist .org. Welcome back. This is Chris Orens, and if you just tuned us in for the entire program today with about a half hour to go, we—I'm sorry, we have about an hour to go—we have as our guest today

01:09:33

Kevin Swanson, and we are discussing his book, Apostate, The Men Who Destroyed the

01:09:39

Christian West. And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

01:09:47

chrisarnson at gmail .com, and we do have a pastor in Greensboro, North Carolina, Pastor Sterling Vanderwerker of Shepherds Fellowship.

01:10:01

I don't usually give out the listeners' full names and so on, but because of the fact that I have heard many wonderful things about Pastor Sterling Vanderwerker and the

01:10:13

Shepherds Fellowship, I figured I would give him a plug. And he says,

01:10:18

Dear Pastor Kevin, I am sad to say that my eldest homeschool daughter does not desire to homeschool her three young children and is considering even resorting to government schools.

01:10:34

She has benefited from an entire homeschool education and is a graduate of the Master's College in Santa Clarita, California.

01:10:43

Her frustration is from the parenting of her oldest daughter, who is the epitome of the strong -willed child.

01:10:51

Any advice on how to proceed now that she has stated she will not homeschool?

01:10:57

Perhaps a Christian school is still an option, but we refuse to support the idea of even a local

01:11:02

Christian school option, as there is not a satisfactory option in our area.

01:11:09

Should we, sure would, appreciate some wisdom for this concerned grandpa?

01:11:17

Well, I have to say that raising children is an amazing act of faith. It takes a great amount of faith to step out and raise our kids.

01:11:27

We had a child, our first child, who was extremely difficult, and I think God did that for us, for our benefit.

01:11:36

What we need to do is we need to encourage each other to step out in faith and do the thing that requires the most faith.

01:11:46

That may involve homeschooling, but it also might involve a form of Christian schooling as well.

01:11:51

What we recommend is that you seek out the kind of discipleship that would be the most fruitful, the most

01:12:01

Christ -like. We want to set our children at the feet of Christ. We're to bring our children up in the nurture and the admonition of the

01:12:07

Lord, and so we must ask ourselves, what would the best way to do this be?

01:12:13

I think as parents, oftentimes we get frustrated and upset because our children are not instantly sanctified.

01:12:22

We wonder if they're even regenerated or at what point they are going to be regenerated, but again, that's an act of faith.

01:12:30

What we want to do is be as patient as we possibly can. We need to hupomeno, that's the

01:12:36

Greek word for patience. We just need to pitch our tent, abide under the trial that God has placed before us, and it might take 10, 15, 16, 18 years before our children are exhibiting good fruits.

01:12:57

That's been the case in some cases for our family, but I would just really encourage young parents to not feel like they've got to win the battle in a day.

01:13:08

It may be a struggle day in and day out, but let's just be patient.

01:13:14

Let's continue to apply our love and the truth of God's word in our children's lives every single day.

01:13:23

If you take a child that's very, very difficult and you put them before peers or unsaved teachers, how is that going to improve the situation?

01:13:37

How is that going to be the best way to raise this child in the nurture and the admonition of the

01:13:43

Lord? And so I really would recommend that our children, our grandchildren would resort back to a

01:13:52

Christian form of education as much as they possibly can. You might have to draw in the aid of grandparents.

01:13:59

You might have to draw in the aid of others in the church. We have situations in our church where it's very, very difficult, extremely difficult situations oftentimes with adoptive children, but there's families in the church that have reached out and really assisted other families with these challenging situations.

01:14:20

And over the years, God is gracious. We see some great fruits developing, but sometimes it doesn't happen overnight.

01:14:27

Sometimes parents have to go through some very trying and difficult situations with their children before we begin to see some fruit.

01:14:37

And thank you, Pastor Sterling, and our prayers are with you and your children and grandchildren.

01:14:43

Keep listening to Orange, Sharp, and Zion and spreading the word in North Carolina and beyond. We have

01:14:49

Jeff in Clinton Township, Michigan, who are some well -known people today who are continuing the legacy of the

01:14:58

West's earlier deceivers, and how can we guard our hearts and minds?

01:15:04

Well, that's an interesting question because I'm sure there'd be too many to list, but I guess the difference would be who are consciously and openly doing it.

01:15:13

Yeah. Well, my book is laid out in three sections, and this is important. The first section is the philosophers, which we've spoken of.

01:15:20

The second section is the literary giants like William Shakespeare or Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Hawthorne, and Mark Twain.

01:15:30

Now, those were the guys that were influencing the masses in the 1800s because there were no televisions.

01:15:36

There were no movie screens then. So how do you get the word out? How do you get the word to the masses? Most people don't read the philosophies of Emerson or Nietzsche or these guys that are very erudite, difficult to read.

01:15:48

How do you mass produce for the masses? Well, they did it through the literary giants, through the high school literary curricula, and they did it through Mark Twain and the

01:16:00

Scarlet Letter. These were the books that are carefully used in high schools and colleges, and often

01:16:08

Christian curriculum as well, to be sure that our children are carefully indoctrinated in the genius philosophies of these great genius thinkers.

01:16:20

So the second way in which you mass produce these ideas is through the great literary giants.

01:16:29

But then the next step is what I call the mass culture. It's also why I wrote another book called The Tattooed Jesus, what the real

01:16:35

Jesus would say about pop culture, because pop culture now has become the way to mass produce the ideas of John Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Darwin.

01:16:46

It really happens through Hollywood and Nashville. And so the final section of the book is how you mass produce it out of the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.

01:16:56

How do you get a secularized society that is completely homosexualized, a society that is embracing homosexual marriage and killing between a third and a half of their babies?

01:17:08

How do you do that? How do you get to a society that's thoroughly destroyed and a social system where 59 % of kids are born out of wedlock to millennials?

01:17:18

How do you get there from 1 % at the turn of the 20th century? And the answer is you've got to mass produce the ideas through education, yes, but pop culture is by far more influential.

01:17:29

Pop culture and peer influence for our children in the high schools and the junior highs, far more damaging than the classrooms, because most kids don't pay much attention to what's going on in the classroom, but they certainly are connected with pop culture.

01:17:43

Lady Gaga, Hollywood, and Nashville. And so who are the leaders today? I did a movie review on my radio program called

01:17:50

Generations on La La Land. I tend to do these reviews from time to time to remind people that the most influential idea generators of the day come out of Hollywood.

01:18:02

So I would say the producer of La La Land was one of the most influential leaders of our day.

01:18:09

And not just that, but of course other movies as well. It's coming out of Hollywood. Most of the movies coming out of Hollywood is either

01:18:15

Frederick Nietzsche or John Pulsart. I mean, that's just it. And you look at the Christian film reviews on La La Land and what do you see?

01:18:23

A beautiful romantic story, an old -fashioned romance, et cetera, et cetera. Never mind the fact they were shacking up together, committing fornication and breaking up.

01:18:33

Organizations like PluggedIn .com, Christianity Today, they're all Gaga over La La Land.

01:18:38

But why? Because they're taken by the philosophies of Frederick Nietzsche and John Pulsart.

01:18:43

They just don't know it. In fact, one of the Christian film reviews said, this film does not present any grand philosophical statements.

01:18:52

Well, as it turns out, it absolutely does. You read the lyrics of the songs word for word, it's just Frederick Nietzsche.

01:18:59

It's absolutely Frederick Nietzsche. It's Frederick Nietzsche absolutely word for word.

01:19:04

Anybody with a freshman knowledge of philosophy would know immediately that this is

01:19:12

Frederick Nietzsche, just popularized for the masses. So where are you getting this ideology today?

01:19:18

You're getting it at the movie theater through these beautiful little musicals called La La Land that I'm sure most

01:19:25

Christians are going to embrace wholeheartedly. Yeah, and you kept repeating at different points of the program,

01:19:32

The Scarlet Letter. That book has done a lot to slander the

01:19:37

Puritans and shape the minds of even our current generation about who the

01:19:44

Puritans were. Oh, yes, absolutely. It was by far the most influential book and author and the most influential writer to destroy the

01:19:53

Puritan legacy in America. No question whatsoever about that. But of course, the book presents a terrible, terrible dichotomy between two people, and that was

01:20:05

Dimmesdale and Hester, Hester Prynne. Hester Prynne being the modern feminist who wants to do whatever she wants to do.

01:20:12

She wants to commit adultery and she wants to get away with it. She wants to go live with the natives.

01:20:18

She wants to throw off 1 ,800 years of the influence of Jesus Christ and the

01:20:26

Word of God in the Western world. And she says that. So that's Hester Prynne. And then the other man is

01:20:31

Dimmesdale, who sadly, all he has is a copy of the Hebrew Old Testament. He doesn't read the

01:20:37

New Testament, no reference of Christ at all in the whole story. And he attempts a salvation by works or a salvation by self -atonement methodology to bring out his salvation.

01:20:48

And he's a miserable wreck at the end. So you place the salvation by works motif where there is no grace, there is no

01:20:55

Christ next to Hester Prynne who wants to be the autonomous, the modern feminist.

01:21:01

And guess who wins? In the end, it's the feminist Hester Prynne becomes a prophetess of the New Age at the end.

01:21:06

And this becomes one of the most horrific stories ever written. Of course, very revolutionary.

01:21:12

And in fact, he was also apparently affected by a demon. His friend pointed out the same demon that had influenced him.

01:21:20

That was Herman Melville, pointed out the same demon that affected him had infected

01:21:25

Hawthorne as well. In fact, Hawthorne acknowledged that it was a tale that was cooked up in the fires of hell itself.

01:21:35

So he had admitted that himself. So the fact that Hawthorne was affected by a demon, demon possessed while writing this incredible book that became probably the most influential book in American history, outside of the

01:21:50

Bible and Pilgrim's Progress, I think is something that Christians need to know, especially those who are going to study this book.

01:21:58

Now, I've got a course called Worldviews and Conflict, where I go through these, quote unquote, great authors and these great philosophers.

01:22:05

I teach young college kids and high school kids how to carefully discern the great literature that was produced in the

01:22:15

English and the American worlds over the last 200 to 300 years. And I think some of our students need to read this stuff in order to discern it, but be very careful.

01:22:27

That's my counsel to parents. If they're going to read secular stuff, be very, very careful how they read it and be sure that they're ready to discern it.

01:22:38

Stan Mallow Very, very wise advice. And we have Lou in Sharpsburg, Georgia.

01:22:45

Do you think men who are compromising on the book of Genesis concerning Adam and Eve, millions of years, etc.,

01:22:55

are doing so because they are afraid of committing intellectual suicide? Dr. Ken Jones Well, yes,

01:23:02

I think many are concerned that they maintain an erudite and intellectual reputation amongst the academics of the day.

01:23:16

That's really important for those who have been raised up in academia. But as Christians, I think our goal, our responsibility when we're dealing with the world is to be prepared to bring down every imagination, every high thing that exalts itself above the knowledge of God and Christ.

01:23:36

Those are our marching orders. So we're called to engage the antithesis.

01:23:42

We're called to engage these ideas and cast down imaginations. And those who aren't prepared to do that are probably most likely to develop a synthesis with unbelievers and unbelieving thought.

01:23:57

And that, of course, has been the heritage of most Christian intellectualism, most

01:24:03

Christian colleges and Christian universities since Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton had their beginnings.

01:24:12

Stan Mallow We have Seth in Randleman, North Carolina. He has a question that's a little bit off -topic, but it involves your title anyway.

01:24:23

It's not entirely off -topic, but it's somewhat off -topic. He asks, in what way should we treat those who are apostate from the church?

01:24:33

I realize we are going to treat them somewhat different than unbelievers in general, but in what respect should we deal with them?

01:24:42

Dr. John Sanford It's a great question. I think there's a point at which you read 1 Corinthians 5 and somebody who's a fairly recent apostate, that is, they've been in the church, they've been called one of us, and they've been with us for a time, though not of us.

01:25:00

There's a period of time at which some degree of shunning is in order.

01:25:06

And I think we need to be careful with those who are more of the recent apostate type.

01:25:14

That is, they know the truth, they've heard the truth, and they're turning away from it with sort of an epistemological self -consciousness about it.

01:25:24

That's going to be a group that probably is not going to receive what we have to say, because they've already rejected it.

01:25:34

And so I think some level of avoidance has to happen there.

01:25:40

Now, there are some that perhaps haven't really heard the truth. They're a product of three or four or five generations of steady, slow but steady apostasy away from all remnants of the

01:25:53

Christian faith. They haven't been to church their entire life. Perhaps their grandparents were in church but turned away from the church.

01:26:02

There you have more of an opportunity to interact, and they may have some interest in the things that you have to say.

01:26:10

So I think it just depends on the person. Now, when I speak of apostasy and apostate, sometimes I refer to a generational apostasy, much like what you find with Emerson or Darwin or John Paul Sartre.

01:26:23

What you find is these apostasies happened over about three generations.

01:26:30

In other words, the apostasy began with the grandparents. It's interesting with Ernest Hemingway that he was a massive apostate writing some of horrendous pornographic stuff at 17 years of age, and yet was raised in a

01:26:43

Baptist home. They were taught creationism. They were all part of Wheaton College.

01:26:49

That was sort of the evangelical neighborhood in which Ernest Hemingway was raised.

01:26:57

His father would give him Christian books and they'd read him the

01:27:02

Christian Bible. They'd have devotions together. But Ernest Hemingway, of course, turns into a radical apostate.

01:27:08

At 17 or 18 years of age, he throws off everything. There's more on the story.

01:27:15

In fact, he almost shoots his father. He comes to the point where he wants to kill his father. In the end,

01:27:20

Ernest Hemingway kills himself. But I think what some people don't know is that Ernest Hemingway's father went the same direction.

01:27:28

Ernest Hemingway's father committed suicide as well. And so there was an apostasy going on in the heart of this

01:27:35

Baptist father, raising this tremendously powerful apostate in his home.

01:27:41

So the apostasy was retroactive in the previous generation in the case of Ernest Hemingway.

01:27:46

And this is the kind of thing what we're seeing in Christian churches, Baptist churches, Presbyterian churches in our generation as well.

01:27:54

I think this kind of apostasy has been going on for about 200 years. And we now are going to our final break.

01:28:01

I misspoke earlier and said that we were going to our final break before, but this is the final break and it's going to be much shorter.

01:28:08

So don't despair. We're going to be right back with our guest, Kevin Swanson. If you'd like to join us on the air before we run out of time with your own question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:28:20

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And there are still others waiting to have their questions asked. And I will try to get to you as soon as I can.

01:28:27

And hopefully we'll get to all of you before we run out of time. Don't go away. We will be right back after these messages.

01:29:46

I am Chris Arnson, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, here to tell you about an exciting offer from World Magazine, my trusted source for news from a

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01:30:01

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01:30:57

Iron Sharpens today. Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune into A Visit to the

01:31:07

Pastor's Study every Saturday from 12 noon to 1 p .m. Eastern Time on WLIE Radio, www .wlie540am

01:31:19

.com. We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you, and we invite you to visit the pastor's study by calling in with your questions.

01:31:27

Our time will be lively, useful, and I assure you, never dull. Join us this Saturday at 12 noon

01:31:33

Eastern Time for A Visit to the Pastor's Study, because everyone needs a pastor. Welcome back, this is

01:31:39

Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in for the last 90 minutes, with a little less than a half hour to go, we have had as our guest and will continue to have as our guest today,

01:31:50

Kevin Swanson, and we are discussing his book, Apostate the Men Who Destroyed the

01:31:56

Christian West. If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

01:32:02

If you have a question, chrisarnzen at gmail .com. Tyler in Mastic Beach, Long Island, New York asks,

01:32:09

Is it true that apostasy is a progressive heresy over time with many contributors to its lies and evil presuppositions?

01:32:23

Good, I think you have apostasy in an individual sense, where it affects an individual.

01:32:29

And then you have it in sort of a corporate sense, where it begins to affect entire families, entire churches, denominations, and then entire nations.

01:32:39

So yeah, I think they're both ends. You have both types. Now apostasy probably begins more so in the church than it does in the schools.

01:32:52

So that's what we're seeing in our generation is massive apostasies in these liberal denominations that are increasingly endorsing, say, sins of homosexuality and abortion.

01:33:05

These are external indications that something's gone terribly wrong, and God is no longer looked to as the source of ethics, but man is turning to himself as the source of ethics.

01:33:17

But there's worldly philosophers that come up with these worldly systems of ethics and have had such tremendous influence upon the modern world, guys like Jeremy Bentham, for example.

01:33:31

You know, there are a lot of Christians who get weary of those from radio, microphones, and TV sets, and in literature, warning them about every single thing they happen to pick up to read or watch on a

01:33:50

TV screen or in a movie theater. They say, Are you kidding me? This seems like some kind of a conspiracy theory over and over again.

01:33:58

We're hearing about hidden meanings in things and later finding out that those hidden meanings were never intended by the author.

01:34:07

Is there a way to go overboard on this and wind up avoiding secular literature and secular forms of art that are available to Christians to enjoy, or perhaps you don't even believe that there are such a thing as completely secular forms of art and literature that we are to enjoy?

01:34:31

But what is your take on what I just said? That's a good question, but I think the way I analyze literature and art forms is,

01:34:38

I think, helpful. I think it's a balanced way to do it. I talk about baseline and trajectory.

01:34:45

Every author has something of a baseline that is, he comes at it from something of a

01:34:52

Christian heritage or a Christian world. You see that with Shakespeare. You see it with Hawthorne.

01:34:58

He acknowledges something of a fear of God. There's no question. He has some influence that's come from 1 ,600 years of a

01:35:06

Christian world -wide view. But what's his trajectory? What happens with so many is they say,

01:35:12

Well, there's a lot of good here, but they don't analyze trajectory. Where is he going?

01:35:17

Where is his work going? Where is this man's heart pointing? What is he believing?

01:35:24

Where is he moving? Art is always in motion. Human communication is in motion.

01:35:30

Man is going somewhere. Man is teaching something, and his heart is moving in some direction or another.

01:35:38

So I think it's really helpful to look at a man's work, not some isolated scene and not one isolated chapter of a book, but to the entire book and sometimes the entire work of the man or the woman who's done this thing.

01:35:50

And you have to analyze not just the baseline of, Yes, he's got some good things here.

01:35:57

Yes, there is something of a redemptive story. By the way, every religion has a redemptive story. Every religion has a problem, and they try to present something of a solution for it.

01:36:06

It doesn't matter what it is. Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, whatever it is. So this idea that everybody shares something of a substance of a biblical worldview is not true.

01:36:18

So what I recommend is read Christians. Read Christian stuff. So we're doing Christian curriculum.

01:36:25

We're producing Christian curriculum as a ministry, generations .org. We've done three or four textbooks of Christian writings,

01:36:33

Christian literature. I recommend that we give our kids Christian literature, first and foremost. Set them at the feet of Christians, first and foremost.

01:36:43

And, yeah, the problem is the world we live in is, especially the art world, the theater world is dominated by atheistic agnostics, those who self -consciously have denied

01:36:55

Christ. And so, yeah, it's a little bit like just trying to make something out of the gladiators at a

01:37:03

Roman Coliseum. I'm sure there are a lot of Christians saying, well, why can't we have some entertainment for us?

01:37:09

98 % of the entertainment, I'm sorry, 99 .999 % of the entertainment at the Coliseum seems sort of pagan.

01:37:16

Well, that's the kind of world we live in today. Our world is largely dominated by those who have abandoned the

01:37:23

Christian faith. But they're still throughout history. You'll find really good books written by Christians.

01:37:30

So let's prefer those first and foremost. And then after that, if we have the time and we have the skill and the ability, then let's be sure we can discern what the pagans are presenting.

01:37:46

And the problem is it can be a challenge to distinguish between that which is good and that which is bad, especially in art forms that are fairly creatively presented.

01:37:59

And so, yeah, I think we have to be on our toes. We have to be careful. When I go into a movie theater,

01:38:04

I go in with a notebook and encourage my children to have notebooks with them as well.

01:38:10

And we'll take copious notes throughout. Now, it kind of ruins the romance of the entertainment, but...

01:38:16

It even bothers other people when you're using a flashlight. Yeah, exactly. It's hard to see what you're doing, but I just scratch one line on one page and move to the next page.

01:38:26

So we'll use up entire notebooks through the movie. Okay, 17 cents on a meat notebook ain't bad for one movie.

01:38:32

So, you know, we'll analyze the movie. And I always ask, okay, what are the good points? Well, the good point is this little girl gave her life for her sister when she went out to play in the

01:38:44

Hunger Games. Okay, let's talk about the Hunger Games. Let's talk about the worldview behind this.

01:38:50

Let's talk about the ethics of taking somebody's life. If somebody's holding a gun to your head and you have to take the life of somebody else.

01:38:58

Let's talk about the example of David and Saul. David had an opportunity to take the life of Saul, but didn't.

01:39:05

Even as Saul was hunting him down. How does that apply to the Hunger Games? You see, what are we doing?

01:39:10

We're slicing and dicing, taking it apart, analyzing it, critiquing it. Finding that these pagan ethical situations where they're trying to prove some kind of situational ethics is faulty.

01:39:25

Based on a biblical view of ethics, when it comes to the Sixth Commandment, the application of the

01:39:31

Sixth Commandment to the gladiator battles. And then we also ask the question, what would

01:39:36

Augustine say if he walked into this movie theater? He'd say three things. The first thing he'd say is, wow, there looks like there's something pagan about this.

01:39:44

I recognize these games. So he would recognize the gladiatorial games. But he'd say, well, they don't do it anywhere near as pagan as they used to.

01:39:53

The second thing he'd say is, wow, it seems like maybe Christ has been here. In fact, he even took his name in vain.

01:40:00

So he's been here. That'd be the second thing. I smell something of Christ. Somewhere in the background of these producers, these directors, and these writers, there has been a

01:40:09

Christ somewhere. And then the third thing he'd say is, and they've turned away from him. They have apostatized.

01:40:16

They have rejected him. Now they're taking his name in vain. So if Augustine is walking into the

01:40:22

Hunger Games, what would he say? And then we'll take that apart and take a look at it. So, yeah,

01:40:27

I think we have to be critical. I think we have to look at the good part. I think we have to say, what's the baseline?

01:40:33

What are they borrowing from a Christian worldview? And then how are they violating a Christian worldview as they move along in the production of this movie?

01:40:41

And, of course, another thing Augustine might say if he walked into a movie theater is, who are these giants on this wall?

01:40:47

What is this technology? R .J.

01:40:53

in White Plains, New York, asks, I have a lot of friends who are heavily involved in the classical education movement, and it seems to be quite a wonderful thing that they are accomplishing for the cause of Christianity and children of our generation.

01:41:15

But they also incorporate secular literature, especially the classics, in this form of education.

01:41:23

What are your guests' thoughts on this? R .J. That's a great question. It's the million -dollar question of the day.

01:41:29

It was a big question for Augustine, and I recommend my book, Keep the Faith and Education, for all of the in -depth study of what the great

01:41:38

Christian father said about classical education. Augustine called it a torrent from hell and couldn't believe that people would pay money to teach their children what

01:41:47

Homer wrote. So he said that in his confession. So there's certainly, in the history of Christianity, a great deal of antipathy against the

01:41:56

Greek classics. Martin Luther viewed Aristotle as a devil, thought he was a demon in human clothes.

01:42:05

So here's what we need to do. The first thing we've got to do is we need to distinguish between a humanist classical education and a

01:42:15

Christian classical education. If you're in a classical education, you're just giving your children some grammar, introducing some thesis, antithesis in the critical stage, and then on to the rhetoric stage.

01:42:28

Okay, that's all right. But if you're mixing in classics, pagan classics, and you're giving little children pagan classics before they have the ability to distinguish between what is good and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil, that's a problem.

01:42:46

So my recommendation is that you maintain a strong and antithetical line between thesis antithesis.

01:42:53

You'd be extremely critical, extremely discriminating on this pagan literature.

01:43:00

Tear it apart, rip it, shred it, point out all of the issues, all of the problems with it.

01:43:06

If that's the way you're teaching classical literature, good for you. You've maintained an antithetical line between that which is good and that which is evil, that which is true, that which is false.

01:43:16

And you're also digging down layer by layer by layer to find the various layers of epistemological thought and theory in these writings.

01:43:27

So now, the average 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 -year -old isn't going to have a clue. I see what happens generally in modern literature classes, even amongst

01:43:38

Christian schools or Christian classical schools, is they tend to mix it all up in anthologies, they mix it up historically, and so they present all these different world views, and the kids have a very hard time distinguishing what is right and what is wrong.

01:43:50

What I recommend in our Christian classics approach that we've taken as a ministry, I recommend that Christians present, first and foremost, the

01:44:00

Bible, secondly, when it comes to literature, Christian authors. So in the 8th grade, the 9th grade, the 10th grade, the 11th grade, present the

01:44:08

Christian authors. Be sure they can read Augustine. They've read Augustine inside and out. They've read it three, four times over.

01:44:14

They've read Calvin's Institutes, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, A Campus's Imitation of Christ. Have they read these? Do they know them inside and out?

01:44:21

So read the Christian classics first. Be sure they get this stuff down really, really well, and if they're ready by the time they're in the 12th grade or by the time they're in their early years of college and they want to pursue more literary endeavors, give them a little bit of the pagan classics.

01:44:40

The problem, of course, is that if you give them the classical literary giants, and they happen to be unbelievers, you're setting them at the feet of some of the most brilliant teachers who have ever lived.

01:44:53

And you're saying, here, learn from their religious perspective. It's like sending them to the imams in some

01:45:00

Muslim mosque. You're saying, just, you know, study these guys. Emulate them in both their method and their content.

01:45:09

Well, that's dangerous. Be ever so cautious with that. If you read Augustine, if you read Jerome and the early church fathers, you're going to find them cautioning people.

01:45:18

Oh, be so careful. Be ever so careful about ever giving kids any of these pagan classics.

01:45:24

Be so careful. First and foremost, Jerome says, first and foremost, give them the Bible, and then give them the

01:45:30

Christian authors who've been writing for the last 300 years. And of course, since you yourself take your children to secular movies, but use it to have them actually almost like a classroom, contrast the worldview being presented in the films with the scripture, you obviously don't rule out completely using secular literature and art in any way, shape, or form.

01:45:58

That's right. So what I say is, first establish them in a biblical worldview. Make sure they're rooted and grounded strongly, and then teach them how to carefully discern and discriminate as they have opportunity to interact with the worldly literature or the worldly movies of the day.

01:46:20

Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, says, you could hardly see any kind of a documentary or hear any kind of a discussion about American culture without having a discussion on the

01:46:36

Beatles. Does your guest have any comments on how the

01:46:41

Beatles have either positively or negatively transformed the culture?

01:46:48

Are they just a symptom, or were they part of the cause? Well, as it turns out, the

01:46:54

Beatles play a very big part in the last section of the book because I get into what I call Pandora's machine and the influence of mass culture.

01:47:03

Yes, the only way to mass produce the ideas of John Paul Sartre and Friedrich Nietzsche is going to be through the workings of mass culture through Hollywood and Nashville, and the

01:47:17

Beatles show up as the number one influence in mass culture in the 1960s. I've got a few others as well that I include, but I analyze their worldview a bit.

01:47:27

Of course, John Lennon and his works. Very, very influential men. Yes, they had powerful ideas.

01:47:35

They were effectively regurgitating Emerson and John Paul Sartre in their music.

01:47:43

Of course, catchy music. You know, it's music that people get to like, but then you analyze the lyrics and you carefully analyze the lyrics.

01:47:52

Take the romance out of it for a moment. Just put them down in black and white. You do this with movie quotes as well.

01:47:58

It's very easy to do it. Just simply put them in black and white before you and ask yourself, what are they saying? When somebody says, follow your heart in a movie, well, just study that.

01:48:06

Follow your heart. What does that mean? Follow your heart. Oh, that's Emerson. Oh, that's transcendentalism.

01:48:13

Okay, okay. Okay, now I see what he's saying. See, these are the preachers and the prophets. But most people, they're sitting there listening, watching the movie and there's a romantic scene and the music is playing and somebody says, oh, you just need to follow your heart.

01:48:29

And all the little teeny boppers watching the movie are going, oh, I can't believe this. Oh, I love this movie.

01:48:35

It's my favorite movie of all time. Why? Well, they're just drawn into it like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

01:48:40

Just the romance of it, the emotion of it just draws them in. And that's, of course, what movies and music are supposed to do.

01:48:47

But what we encourage people to do is establish a worldview first, discern what they're saying. And then maybe you can enter into it.

01:48:55

Maybe you shouldn't enter into it. But certainly the mind should engage first and say, okay, is this content good content?

01:49:02

Or am I just being drawn into supporting ideas that are antithetical to Scripture?

01:49:08

And of course, we can never forget the great Jiminy Cricket who said, always let your conscience be your guide.

01:49:17

And of course, John Lennon really took the music to a far deeper ideological level than what was sung when he was with the

01:49:29

Beatles. Sure, yeah. A Day in the Life is one that I think has got a lot of philosophy to it.

01:49:35

Imagine, of course, is one of the most obvious illustrations of atheism and such.

01:49:41

I'm amazed when I hear about people playing that at funerals, as if that is supposed to give anybody peace of heart, thinking that there's no heaven.

01:49:50

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, encouragement is to be discerning and begin in the college classroom, begin in the junior high classroom, begin in the high school classroom.

01:50:01

Education is extremely important these days, because that's where kids spend most of their time throughout the week.

01:50:08

They're not sitting at the feet of Jesus throughout the week. Oftentimes they're sitting at the feet of some of the most intellectual geniuses on the humanist side that the world has ever produced.

01:50:20

And so my caution to people is be careful with education, and then be careful with mass culture.

01:50:26

Kids' lives are taken up with education between about 8 a .m. in the morning and 3 p .m.

01:50:33

in the afternoon. Then from 3 p .m. in the afternoon until 12 midnight, they're sitting at the feet of Lady Gaga and Steven Spielberg, bringing in all the mass culture.

01:50:41

And so after all that mass culture, and after all that instruction from John Dewey and Charles Darwin in their classrooms, parents wonder why they're not following Jesus at 22 years of age.

01:50:53

What happened? We gave them Sunday school. They had 20 minutes a week of Sunday school. Well, they forget about the 165 hours they were sitting at the feet of Charles Darwin and Lady Gaga.

01:51:03

So I think it's a simple, simple answer as to why most kids, most millennials, are walking away from the faith.

01:51:13

There's a reason why George Barna found only 0 .5 percent of the mosaics in America hold to a

01:51:22

Christian worldview in even the most simplistic sense, and that's down from 14 percent in their parents' generation.

01:51:28

That's a 97 percent apostasy rate in just a single generation. How in the world does it happen?

01:51:34

How do you get a 97 percent of 16 to 25 -year -olds walking away from a

01:51:41

Christian world and life view, at least held by 14 percent of parents in the previous generation?

01:51:47

The answer is obvious, really obvious. Pandora's machine, the pop culture machine,

01:51:53

Hollywood, Nashville, guys like Almenta Wilder, a little farmer boy up in upstate New York, you know, when he was plowing his fields in Little House on the

01:52:01

Prairie, he didn't have access to an iPod. He didn't really have that much time to spend in a classroom, taking in Charles Darwin and John Dewey, and he certainly didn't have much

01:52:14

Lady Gaga and Steven Spielberg going on. Really, he didn't even own an iPod. He didn't know what a television was.

01:52:20

He never tuned into AM and FM radio, so he was not programmed like the masses are today.

01:52:28

So yeah, things have changed dramatically, and if parents are concerned about passing on this faith to their children and onto their grandchildren, they're going to have to get really radical with how they handle mass culture, literature, education, and so forth.

01:52:42

I think that's the challenge of my book Apostate, Chris. B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania wants to know, what are your guests' thoughts on why there is such a dearth of biblically orthodox

01:52:54

Christians in the arts and media and modern literature, especially when

01:53:01

I'm speaking of literature, I'm referring to fiction and things read for recreational use.

01:53:07

Does your guest even think Christians should be entering into those areas with their gifts?

01:53:14

Absolutely, Chris, absolutely. But here's the problem. The modern Reformation has only affected science for the most part.

01:53:22

Thankfully, guys like Henry Morris, John C. Whitcomb, Ken Ham, and others have really done their best to try to, you know, bring in a

01:53:29

Reformation of learning in the area of science. And when Ken Ham interviewed the Christian colleges, some 600 or 700

01:53:35

Christian colleges in America, he found twice as many liberal arts professors believed in older evolution versus the science department heads.

01:53:45

You know, crazy, crazy. Twice as many of the literature departments and the religion departments were saying, go evolution, go evolution, versus the science department heads of these

01:53:54

Christian colleges. Is it because literature professors know way more about science than science professors?

01:54:01

No, no. It's because literature professors and liberal arts professors are liberal.

01:54:06

They haven't reformed. There has been almost no Reformation whatsoever that I know of in literature, in liberal arts, amongst

01:54:15

Christians. There hasn't been a radical shift in the way they think, in the way they present antithesis thesis in the literary classrooms.

01:54:26

And for this reason, I'm calling for a massive Reformation of thought. And that's what this book,

01:54:31

Apostate, was to do. It's to challenge liberal arts professors. It's time right now to stop going gaga over La La Land.

01:54:40

It's time to stop walking into a classroom and saying, Hawthorne, Twain, Shakespeare, they're geniuses.

01:54:48

We're not worthy to be in their presence. We're not worthy to be in their presence. It's time to get done with that. It's time to slice and dice.

01:54:55

It's time to get critical. It's time to discern. And so I think we need

01:55:01

Christians in liberal arts. I don't want to be the first one and the only one to slice and dice

01:55:07

Nathaniel Hawthorne. I think somebody needs to go through his whole career and really analyze it from a distinctively

01:55:13

Christian perspective. I think there ought to be Christian critique going on. And I think it's time to raise up a massive

01:55:22

Reformation in the area of liberal arts. And even the production of movies. I'm thankful for the Kendrick Brothers and others who've tried to step into the area of movie production.

01:55:33

And so there's been something of a rising Reformation in the independent film industry. And I'm thankful for that.

01:55:39

But wow, we need a radical Christian Reformation in the area of literature and literary work.

01:55:48

And I just hope that happens sometime in this generation. Otherwise, I don't know what's going to happen to our future pastors.

01:55:55

What happens is when our future pastors, future political leaders, go to colleges, these

01:56:00

Christian colleges, these conservative colleges, inevitably they're going to be liberalized. Yeah. Because that's the direction that liberal arts sets you going.

01:56:11

And until there's something of a Reformation going on in those departments, and I just haven't seen it thus far. Well, before we run out of time,

01:56:19

I want to make sure that I give your contact information. First of all, we have Generations .org

01:56:25

for the ministry Generations, which also is the publisher of the book that we have been giving away,

01:56:32

Apostate, The Men Who Destroyed the Christian West. And also, if you want to find out more about our guests,

01:56:42

Kevin Swanson's own radio program, go to Generations .org forward slash radio.

01:56:49

And that's Generations Radio. Also, the church where he serves as a teaching elder,

01:56:56

Reformation Church of Elizabeth, Colorado, for any of our listeners in Colorado or visiting there. You can go to ReformationChurch .com.

01:57:05

It's an excellent website. You must have got the website when they were first making websites. ReformationChurch .com,

01:57:12

and that's Reformation Church of Elizabeth, Colorado, an Orthodox Presbyterian congregation. Do you have any other contact information?

01:57:19

Yeah. If anybody would like a bulk rate on this book for $6 a copy, because I'll do it just for your audience.

01:57:28

Oh, great. You've got to buy more than one. If you buy more than one, then I'll give it to you for $6.

01:57:34

You've got to promise you'll be handed out to your kids, your grandkids, people who could use it, especially people going to college.

01:57:42

But email me at host at Generations .org. That's host at Generations .org

01:57:48

to get a special rate of $6 on this hardback book, Apostate, The Men Who Destroyed the

01:57:55

Christian West. Does that also include the shipping? Yeah, we'll include shipping on that. It's just a deal for your audience, and that's it,

01:58:03

Chris. Well, you're going to be amazed, folks. Those of you who won this book, when you get this book, when you know that you can order more for $6 a piece, you're going to be absolutely astonished, because not only is this a phenomenal book in regard to its content, which should be your first priority, but as far as the binding and everything, this is a gorgeous hardback book we're talking about.

01:58:26

In one minute, if you could just summarize what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners. Yes, I want to encourage people to use the

01:58:36

Word of God as the standard and come back to the Word of God and establish a strong thesis and tithes between what the world is saying and what

01:58:44

God is saying, and let's move on with a reformation of education for our children.

01:58:51

I think this is really what needs to happen if we're going to salvage a generation and keep the faith from generation on to generation.

01:58:57

There's a huge generational leak going on right now, and it's for parents to make the right decisions relating to a

01:59:03

Christian education for their kids that I think will make a big difference. So if you want multiple copies of $6, it's hostatgenerations .org.

01:59:14

That's the email, hostatgenerations .org. Thank you so much, and if you could hold on after we go off the air, because I want to schedule another interview with you.

01:59:23

Perhaps we could talk about the NOAA conference in August of 2017. So if you don't mind holding on,

01:59:29

I'd like to schedule another interview with you. Sounds great, Chris. God bless you. God bless the ministry here. Thank you, and I want everybody to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

01:59:40

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you and your questions for our guest tomorrow on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.