Canadian Tyranny and Anthony Bradley Remote Diagnosis

Alpha & Omega Ministries

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

Comments are disabled.

00:45

Greetings, welcome to The Dividing Line. It is a Thursday and on the screen next to me is an image from up in Canada, Alberta, and you have the

01:00

Grace Life Church. Two layers of fencing around the Grace Life Church.

01:06

You have police officers and police vehicles. You of course have everyone wearing masks outdoors, which should tell you immediately what's really going on.

01:20

What I mean by that is every study that has been done demonstrates that outside, outdoors transmission of a virus is next to impossible.

01:31

You almost have to jump on somebody and French kiss them, especially if there is almost any wind, which in Canada seems to be fairly incessant.

01:41

So you have all the symbols of authority on people's faces that do nothing, especially when outdoors.

01:50

This is the government flexing its muscles. This is tyranny, what it looks like.

01:56

If you're sitting there going, no, no, no, no, there are rules. You are the problem and you will end up being very complicit in the destruction of your own life and your own liberties than you already are.

02:08

I'll just tell you that straight up front. But you have Grace Life Church closed down by public health initiatives.

02:18

Now I'm, how long ago was it, Rich? About three years ago, I'd say.

02:24

Yeah, about three years ago or so. We have a common friend who would call us and talk to us.

02:31

Talk to you more than me. Three and a half. Three and a half or so. And his name is

02:39

Michael Fallon. And Mike, years and years ago, had been involved in putting on a lot of events, a lot of conferences.

02:50

My problem was, unlike most people who do events and conferences that get it started, that leave, could care less what you're saying, plotting to overthrow the

02:57

US, who cares, you know? He actually hung around and listened and read the literature and went, what?

03:06

What are you people talking about? What is this? Started putting two and two together and started telling the rest of us, me about 2016, late 2016,

03:16

I think it was. And the fact of the matter is, we just didn't have enough of a context.

03:23

It's just sort of like, this sounds so strange. I mean, would people really give up their rights this easily?

03:29

And one of the things that he started telling us, after telling us this great reset was coming and these people didn't decide anything, was that they would use public health initiatives as their greatest power, as their greatest mechanism to get people to do what they wanted them to do.

03:51

Well, if you haven't seen it by now, I don't know how to help you, but you're looking at a picture of it. You're looking at exactly how this works.

03:59

Remember, this is a place that within the past month and a half, released violent child sex offenders from prison, warned the populace they were doing so.

04:13

Okay. So you've got four cops right here and at least two police vehicles locking down an empty

04:23

Christian church while the same people are releasing child sex predators into the populace.

04:35

Don't tell me this is about safety. Don't tell me these people are concerned about public safety.

04:45

Wake up, put your brain in gear. You've been dulled.

04:51

It's just like this, who is the government afraid of?

04:58

They're afraid of a church that had a pastor that would stand up and say, no, we're going to be worshiping Christ. And so they threw him in jail for a month.

05:05

Well, that gave him a black eye. And so, all right, we'll let him out. And then we'll just shutter the church.

05:13

If you cannot see that, let me show you something else. Let me read something to you here.

05:20

This is from the AHS, Alberta Health Services, AHS Statement on Grace Life Church Closure.

05:29

Let me read you something here. There it is.

05:52

This is what you're going to hear. And you're going to hear it over and over and over.

05:57

To protect all Albertans, to protect all Arizonans, to protect all

06:03

Georgians, to protect all Californians, to protect all Phoenicians, to protect whatever. This is what you're going to hear over and over and over again.

06:15

It was last year that we either read you or did it play.

06:21

I forget which one it was, but the leaked material from the Liberal Party in Canada that specifically talked about stricter lockdowns and then

06:31

COVID -21 in March of 2021. Well, they're only a few weeks late and you've got more easily transmitted and potentially more severe variants becoming dominant.

06:46

And so there is an urgent need to minimize spread to protect all Albertans. That's what you're going to hear.

06:55

That's what's going to be used. And the next step is a new variant not touched by the current vaccines.

07:06

So you get to start it all over again. Oh, you've been vaccinated? Doesn't matter now because there's a new variant not touched by these vaccines.

07:17

Because some of us can remember more than a year ago and some of us can remember bird flu, swine flu, all the rest of these things.

07:27

And if you have something between here and here, you will remember that every year there are new variants.

07:38

It was a big scandal just a couple of years ago that they completely blew their prediction as to which variants of the influenza season were going to be predominant.

07:50

They put out the wrong stuff and nothing worked because viruses mutate.

07:58

They always do. And what has happened is we've got this unobtainable standard now.

08:06

There can be no infections. We have to have complete immunity.

08:12

We've never done that before with anything, including with all sorts of diseases that are 10 ,000 times more fatal than COVID -19.

08:23

But people forget short memories and think, just think for a second.

08:32

Without this thing, the United States government would be 25 % less in debt than it is now.

08:42

That money had to go somewhere and it's lining the people's pockets who are now running your life.

08:51

I can't make you see it. I can show you pictures like this and go, hey, look, coming to a church near you, coming to your church.

09:06

And if you just still sit there, well, they're just doing it for my safety and for my good.

09:13

I can't help you. I assume once you walk into the prison yard and the rest of us have been camped out there for quite some time, maybe, hopefully you'll go, oh, but a little bit late then, a little bit late then.

09:28

So here's my suggestion. A couple of things. They've blocked off access to the fields around the church because they know that one really good thing would be if all the

09:40

Christians in Alberta got off their cold duffs and showed up there

09:45

Sunday morning and rung the place and sung the rafters down. How about seeing so loud the fences fall over?

09:54

Maybe all the cops will get converted and they'll do the right thing and stop oppressing Christians and recognize that the whole thing is a joke, that it's a political maneuver.

10:04

Either that, if that doesn't work, then my challenge to the other churches in Alberta, not only do you need to open up all the way, unrestricted, worship

10:17

Lord's Supper the whole nine yards, but some of you that have the sufficient facilities need to open up and say, and this afternoon we invite

10:29

Grace Life Church to use our facilities. That's what you need to do. You think they can close you all down?

10:37

I'm not sure they have that much fencing, but this is what they're counting on. They're counting on the fact that if you read the commentary, if you read the comments and a lot of this stuff, there are so many people that hate these churches.

10:51

The Karen cult has so taken over. Panic and fear and submission and statism is everywhere.

11:01

It's everywhere. And so they're counting on the fact there's just not going to be enough people to make it work because they know that if everybody who claims to be a

11:10

Christian actually did that, they'd be in trouble. Are there that many

11:16

Christians? You need to be calling on every single one with respect, not for what they're doing, but for them as image bearers of God, you need to call on every single one of these people, putting up the fences, manning the fences.

11:29

You need to repent. You will be judged for what you're doing. You'll be judged for what you're doing. We know this because we hold the camp guards from the 1940s.

11:42

Even if we can't prove they did anything else than what they were told, we track them down to Brazil these days and still throw them in the

11:51

Husca. Oh, this is something completely different. Where do you draw the line?

11:58

In communist China right now, it seems to me, it's hard for me to tell the difference between Canada and China right now.

12:05

They both start with a C and they're acting the same way. In China right now, they have mobile units where they come in and they target house churches because they have their fake church.

12:17

They have the government church, the approved church, where you can only say what the government tells you to say. Then you have house churches.

12:25

That's where the true Christians are meeting. And they track you down because they track everything, the phone, they've got cameras everywhere.

12:32

I mean, it's a complete observation situation. And they will get the leaders and the people in the churches and they'll lock you away in a windowless dungeon for months at a time to break you.

12:46

That's what they're doing. So you're sitting there saying that could never happen in the West. Why? Why? You're functioning on the basis of the idea that the

12:57

West has a different view of man. We used to. We don't anymore.

13:03

Secularism, that's the foundation of the Chinese communist system. That's now become the fashion of our day.

13:12

And therefore, totalitarianism, the complete control of the state. And all of you say, you shouldn't be talking about politics.

13:21

Look at the screen. This is a gospel teaching church.

13:27

Shuttered. Don't do that anymore. Based on what? Lies. As Solzhenitsyn said, live not by lies.

13:37

There you got the people walking around. They got lies on their faces. They're outside. It's just it is frustrating to see how many people are willing to live by lies.

13:50

It really, really is. And so to the

13:55

Christians of that church, I have a brother that I have done online writing with.

14:03

I know some people think that sounds very weird, but it is a real thing. And it is real hard.

14:11

But and he can outclimb me like anything because he's like, I don't know, 45, 50 pounds lighter than I am.

14:17

And what, 30 years younger or something along those lines. I can still give him a good run.

14:23

He'll tell you I'm not too bad for being an old fat man. But he goes to this church.

14:29

And so we need to pray for Pastor Coates, his fellow elders.

14:36

As they seek to have God's mind and wisdom.

14:43

This is obviously a tremendous opportunity. There are television cameras and microphones being shoved in his face constantly.

14:51

And so there needs to be a testimony and a witness to the people of Canada and the world as to Christ's claims.

15:04

I mean, folks, I don't care what your theology is. If you don't believe Matthew 28, 19 through 20, what am

15:11

I going to do with you? Really, Matthew 28, 18 through 20. Do you believe that all authority has been given to Christ in heaven and on earth?

15:23

Then why is this government closing down a Christian church? Well, they're doing the wrong thing. No, they're not. No, they're not.

15:32

You can't demonstrate that biblically. The love your neighbor stuff fell apart months and months and months ago.

15:39

First few months, well, okay, we didn't really know. If you can't see it now, if the trillions, that's what the

15:50

T, most of us can barely figure out millions. Billions are beyond most of us and trillions, it just leaves us going, huh?

16:00

If you can't see the trillions of dollars where it's all gone, who has benefited from all of this and how they're the ones running everything now, not just the governments, but corporations.

16:16

And they put all their competitors out of business with the government's cooperation.

16:23

Huh? How did all that happen? Wake up, people. Smell the roses.

16:30

This isn't any conspiracy theory. This is right out in the open. Conspiracy theories, you're supposed to sort of hide them a little bit, you know, try to, this is, hey, let's put fences up and let people put

16:43

TV cameras on us. This isn't hidden. It's obvious what they're doing.

16:49

And some of us want to continue to speak out, at least have a clear conscience once we're finally shut down that we attempted to do the right thing and warn people in the process.

17:02

Now, we weren't going to be in the big studio today. In fact, Rich didn't know until I got here we were going to be.

17:08

I had sent him a message four hours earlier, but sometimes, he and I are a little older and things just go zooming by us.

17:17

And so I was going to talk about what has happened in Canada and call for prayer.

17:28

I would call the Canadian consulate. Pressure has got to be put upon this government that is behaving in the fashion that it's behaving.

17:40

But then this morning, you know, I can't blame

17:46

Owen Strand. First of all, just because he spells his name so oddly, but I can't blame

17:52

Owen Strand because he really didn't have anything to do with it, even though it's his video they put up. But Tom Buck is mentioned.

18:00

And so it is pretty natural for me to blame Tom Buck for lots of things because he is eminently blameable.

18:09

There's something about Tom. First of all, people just call Tom. I'm not sure why, but I could give you names of people who just simply call him and talk to him.

18:18

And there's just something about that Tennessee old boy overalls look that he has that just people call him.

18:27

But I just keep getting splattered with the stuff being thrown at Tom Buck. I mean, Religion News Service even has now a standardized

18:35

Tom Buck graphic that they use so that they can use him. Just yesterday, they did something about him allegedly tweeting about Beth Moore.

18:45

He wasn't even talking about Beth Moore, but they decided he was. And so they've already got a graphic. They get to run in the whole nine yards.

18:53

He's big time, really, really, really big time down there in Lindale, Texas. But I get up this morning and discover that I have been that we have the three amigos of Mild Paranoid Personality Disorder, PPD.

19:13

Wouldn't it be MPPD? Actually, it would be TMPPPD, because it's theologizing mild paranoid personality disorder.

19:25

Well, let me let me show you what I'm talking about here. This is a tweet from Dr.

19:32

Anthony Bradley of King's College. Now, my recollection,

19:40

I could be wrong. I thought he had me blocked. Maybe he unblocked me just to make sure that I could see the shot.

19:47

That's a possibility. I don't know. I it's hard to remember all that stuff on social media.

19:55

But here are two tweets. I'm now Dr. Bradley is a graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

20:04

Not the Westminster West, but the Westminster East. And remember, just for a historical background,

20:11

Westminster grew out of what? Everybody should know this. It's not secret.

20:18

It's part of the history. And it's part of what Westminster used to be very proud of.

20:25

And that is that I guess

20:30

I could. There we go. And that is that Westminster came into existence because of the apostasy of Presbyterian churches.

20:46

Churches were abandoning the gospel, abandoning faith in the supernatural, abandoning faith in the

20:51

Bible. And so a group of men came together and established a conservative seminary.

21:02

Now, why do I point that out? Because what it demonstrates is that you can have wonderful, tremendous confessions of faith.

21:12

You can have wonderful catechisms. You can have centuries, literally centuries, of sound theological commentary upon those confessions of faith and still lose your denominational organizations and schools.

21:32

In fact, you can lose your entire denomination. Why is that relevant?

21:37

Because Dr. Bradley seems to think that having that reformed orthodoxy is sufficient to protect

21:49

Presbyterians from the effects of critical theory, whether it's critical race theory, critical law theory, critical justice theory, critical gender theory, whatever you want to put between the

22:01

C and the T. He will never be impacted by this because he has the

22:07

Westminster Confession. And I had a number of Presbyterian professors at Fuller Theological Seminary.

22:14

One that I had for a number of classes, and hence was some of my first introduction to that realm of things, was a brilliant man.

22:24

I loved the classes I had with him. He was a tremendous scholar and a tremendous teacher, even though he was way to my left.

22:33

And I learned to listen and appreciate and to take the things that I learned and recognize where, okay,

22:43

I can't go there because we have this here, but I'm glad to have that perspective.

22:49

I hadn't really thought of it along those lines. That's the thing that scares fundamentalists to death, by the way, is that you'll listen to something like that and apostatize.

23:00

Well, what it did for me was deepened my faith and helped me to see the distinction between what is what is necessary biblically and what is good traditionally.

23:19

So if you go back and listen to the unbelievable radio broadcast I did, the guy who was in the emergent church and whose name, for some reason, just doesn't stick with me, there's certain names that just don't work in my mind.

23:34

I've got bad sectors in my hard drive that just go bloop. And it doesn't matter how often I try to write to that sector.

23:41

Some of you don't know what that means. Some of you didn't grow up with the old spinning hard drives and have to worry about, quote unquote, bad sectors.

23:52

That was one mechanical thing that seemed to really map over to the human brain fairly well.

23:58

There are, I've got some brain cells in here that my mind goes, oh, I know where to put that name.

24:04

It just keeps putting it in the same spot. And those brain cells are watching ESPN. They're not paying attention.

24:11

They just don't. They're still there, but they ain't working too well. Anyway, I had a conversation with this guy and we, big name, and we had the same background.

24:24

He would talk about his white shirt and his black pants and his squeaky black shoes that he would wear to church as a child.

24:34

And I'm like, I know. When I was reading one of his books before we did the program,

24:40

I'm sitting here going, I remember a New Year's Eve thing we did at Bible Baptist Church in Charlemontown, Pennsylvania.

24:49

And I remember my shoes. I remember looking down and how shiny they were and how stiff they were, how hard they were to walk in.

24:58

Exactly what he was talking about. Right down the road. How does this have anything to do with this?

25:03

Because he, upon recognizing that some of his fundamentalism was nothing but tradition, decided that everything needed to be put on the table and reexamined.

25:19

I didn't do that. I did examine my beliefs, but I recognized that things like the

25:27

Trinity and the deity of Christ and the inspiration of scripture, those are not things you put on the table and go,

25:33

I'm not going to worry about what everybody before me has believed. I'm going to start from fresh, from scratch.

25:40

No, not possible. So he threw the baby out with the bath water and I just changed the bath water.

25:47

That was the difference between us. And so the reality is that these confessions of faith,

25:59

I made the mistake. I've admitted it. People always say, you never admit, you don't admit. I've made lots of mistakes.

26:05

And one of the mistakes I made, and I've talked about this over and over again, is when I saw this stuff,

26:11

I figured years and years ago that sola scriptura would be enough to keep this stuff from ever entering into convictional reformed churches.

26:25

In hindsight, I should have known better because the PCUSA was not always liberal.

26:33

Decades in the past, you could have found very strong gospel preaching fellowships within the

26:39

PCUSA. Now it's gone. What happened? Well, there were people who believed in sola scriptura in the

26:46

PCUSA. They don't anymore. What happened? So we've learned that those are not sufficient.

26:57

And Dr. Bradley should know. He graduated from a seminary that was founded on the recognition that having the

27:06

Westminster Confession of Faith isn't enough. That you can attack language.

27:12

You can attack the history of the transmission of the document in the sense of interpretation of words.

27:17

And you can say that the orthodoxy developed after the writing of the

27:23

Westminster Confession of Faith missed this or missed that. He knows all of this, and yet he pretends.

27:30

He wrote an article where he pretended. This stuff can't hurt Presbyterians. It can hurt these

27:36

Baptists because these Baptists are non -confessional, but it can't hurt Presbyterians because we've got the

27:41

Westminster Confession of Faith. And yet he knows and I know that that document has to be interpreted as well.

27:47

And you have to interpret its history and have to interpret its interpreters. So I point that out so that when we look at what he says, you have that as the background.

28:00

So Anthony Bradley tweets, I'm beginning to wonder if the fixation on wokeness by Strahan, Buck, White, and others is really a way of theologizing mild paranoid personality disorder,

28:19

PPD, projected as defending the faith slash apologetics.

28:26

They live in a world of constant threat, seems a bit neurotic.

28:33

Then of course you have the little, oh, I don't know. They always do that.

28:40

They will literally say that elders in the church are neurotic with mild paranoid personality disorder and then go, but hey,

28:53

I don't know. Followed by they are afraid that wokeness seeks to take you captive.

29:02

It's sad that Baptists think that Kendi's version of anti -racism could dismantle a 2000 year old religion.

29:12

What it reveals, white identity has been central to evangelical identity since day one.

29:19

Now, fascinatingly, here is a man who 10 years ago would never have said this.

29:28

He's saying it now because he has become deeply influenced by critical race theory.

29:37

He's saying what the Westminster authors would never have said, would never have said.

29:44

He has embraced a worldview other than theirs and now he's filtering his own theology through that, saying that what this reveals, what we're going to listen to Owen Strand say here, it reveals that white identity has been central to evangelical identity since day one.

30:03

Now keep that in mind as you listen, because this is an advertisement for the Woke Conference coming up in,

30:09

I think it's, well, he gives the date, somewhere in Texas. And so keep in mind the interpretation that Dr.

30:22

Bradley gives here, because I think that's more important than the accusations of neuroses.

30:28

By the way, I am just amazed personally. I did not know that getting a

30:35

PhD at Westminster gave you the ability to diagnose neuroses from afar, but that's an incredible capacity.

30:47

I did not know that once you got that magical degree from Westminster Seminary that you could diagnose people you've never even spoken to and proclaim them to be suffering from mild paranoid personality disorder.

31:02

Now in another tweet, he likewise said that, well, hold on a second, because, oh,

31:10

I may have to pull that up someplace else. Hold on a second. Actually, there it is.

31:17

Ding, ding, ding, ding. In reformed circles, right here, in reformed circles,

31:25

I find that men often use theology to process their emotions because they don't have any friends.

31:34

So they turn their emotional struggles into a conference or a parachurch ministry just to find connection.

31:41

There is an advertisement for the reformed community for you. And since he didn't say just 1689ers, because he detests

31:49

Reformed Baptists. I mean, he just, he loathes Reformed Baptists. He has made that very, very clear.

31:55

We don't have any friends. I just want you to just sit back and process that and go, okay, this is what an observer has concluded.

32:08

That's great. All right. So let's see what is an example. Remember, this, what we're going to listen to reveals that white identity has been central to evangelical identity since day one.

32:23

I don't know what day one is. This whole evangelical identity thing, what is it?

32:30

Who started it? What's the origin? I mean, from a church history perspective, this is highly questionable.

32:36

Anybody knows that, but this is rhetoric and rhetoric doesn't really survive scholarship very well, but even when being done by people who claim scholarship.

32:46

So let's listen to what Owen had to say here and see how terrible and horrible it actually is.

33:16

A book and an argument like that is that America's major problem and the church's major problem by extension is whiteness.

33:24

Whiteness that causes a culture of white supremacy. If you've heard that kind of argument, that kind of line, if that's been embedded in a sermon, then you have heard wokeness talking and you need to hear

33:37

Colossians 2, 8 afresh. You need to know that this worldly ideology seeks to take you captive.

33:44

You need to be equipped furthermore to do what 2 Corinthians 10, 5 tells us to do, to take every thought captive in order to obey

33:53

Christ. Join us June 11 and 12, 2021 in Denton, Texas for the

33:59

Wokeness and the Gospel Conference. We are going to equip you to not be taken captive by wokeness and instead to take every thought captive for the glory by the blood of Jesus Christ.

34:15

Okay, so there it is. June 11, 12, Denton, Texas. Wokeness and the

34:20

Gospel is the thing there. Now, did you all catch that? So how deeply influenced by critical race theory do you have to be to hear what was just said and come to the conclusion that what that means is white identity has been central to evangelical identity since day one?

34:49

There wasn't anything in it. There was the recognition of this absurd white privilege, white supremacy.

35:00

You're a racist because you're white. But what he was saying was what

35:05

Ibram Kendi is saying is the worst form of racism. And this is true. I've heard him say it myself. The worst form of racism is people who would, for example, repeat my story of my youth.

35:17

How dare you? How dare you say that you were exposed to a mixed race couple as the first family outside of your own family that you have any recollection of?

35:30

And as a result, your best friend had a black, black, black daddy and a white, white, white mommy.

35:36

And so you're like, who cares? Doesn't matter.

35:43

You actually embodied in the way you thought what Martin Luther King dreamed about, that someone would be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.

35:55

Well, that's racism. Martin Luther King was a racist, according to Ibram Kendi.

36:02

He won't say that, but everybody knows that's the case. He just wasn't nearly as progressive as he needed to be.

36:09

It was probably internalized whiteness. That would be the answer for most people.

36:16

Anyways, so that is the terrible, horrible thing. And that's what he just said. And so that somehow means white identity has been central to evangelical identity.

36:26

There's no connection. That's distorted thinking. It's indefensible, but that's what you get from Dr.

36:35

Anthony Bradley. And so if you don't agree with that, not only do you not have friends, but that you are this fixation on wokeness.

36:48

And I've noticed this is always how it happens. When we started sounding the alarm 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago, on the fact that homosexuals were not demanding equal rights, they were demanding

37:05

Uber rights. People were saying, just stick with the

37:11

Bible. Let's not get into politics. Let's not do any of this type of stuff.

37:16

And you're fixated. You're obsessed. The Equality Act passing will obsess every one of you on this subject, unless you're one of those people who today go to a church on Sunday, but if they shudder it and say, you can't go or your taxes are going to go up when you do, you'll go, no worries,

37:44

I'm good. Me and God and Jesus under a tree with my Bible, I'm good. If you're one of those folks, okay,

37:51

I get it. But you're going to see that simply responding to the needed emphasis of the day, the needed attacks that are coming against the church today, that's not obsession.

38:07

That's not a fixation. Instead, we see today this wokeness coming into the church and many of us are responding to it.

38:20

We are providing a response to it. It's not a fixation. I would rather never talk about it again, but it's the way it is.

38:30

So this becomes a theologizing mild paranoid personality disorder projected as defending the faith and apologetics.

38:40

So I am not aware of Dr. Bradley actually doing apologetics in any context.

38:46

I don't know that he's ever actually gone out into the public square and done anything outside of the safe confines of the academy.

38:57

But it's very, very common. The arguments being made is, well, you're insecure.

39:03

And so since you're insecure, then you cover that insecurity by doing all these other things.

39:09

And you know what? There's an element of truth that there is. There's an element of truth that there are certain people, but they happen to be the people who never ever do the rest of the work of ministry.

39:21

They never ever do the preaching and the teaching. They don't speak on a wide variety of subjects.

39:28

They don't teach on everything from church history to the Trinity to the textual criticism and then deal with the

39:35

Muslims and the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses and Roman Catholicism and soul scripture and all. No, they've just got a narrow, narrow spectrum.

39:42

They don't deal with the whole realm of ministry. But if you want projection here, it really seems to come later on.

39:50

And if you look up Anthony Bradley on Twitter, read the comments, read the comments. They are amazing.

39:57

How many people just love the ninth commandment violation thing? They will.

40:04

Wow. It is. It is pretty amazing. So it's a little bit neurotic, according to Anthony Bradley.

40:13

Who is a professor at the King's College, a research fellow at the Acton Institute, and theologian in residence at Redeemer Church to respond to the woke movement.

40:32

Yesterday, I read all of Votie Baucom's new book, Fault Lines, while doing what

40:39

I do. People know how I do that. It was on a bike and started at three thirty in the morning.

40:49

And the responses that I have seen and that I saw even before I was able to get hold of the book, a bunch of other folks were sent early copies, things like that.

41:00

I was not. So I only got it yesterday. But the responses were all pretty much the same type of thing.

41:09

How dare you question the narrative? How dare you do anything like that?

41:14

And then you had, oh, who was that? Oh, it was Anthony Bradley. His response to it was to call it dismissive, arrogant, and childish would be to be too nice.

41:34

Tom Askell actually posted. Again, Dr.

41:42

Bradley doesn't figure his followers are going to be listening to what anybody else has to say anyways, but he posted what

41:47

Bradley said about within three pages, he was trashing the

41:53

Dr. Moore and the ERLC and dah, dah, dah, dah. And then Tom posted the page.

42:00

And he just listed the names. There was no trashing. It was like, these folks have taken this position and there was no trashing or anything going on.

42:11

And he was like, this is all trash. It was so childish.

42:18

You can recognize when someone is blustering. And Anthony Bradley knows that he has changed.

42:27

Thabiti Anyabwili knows he has changed. They know that. You can go back and you can quote from them from only a decade ago, saying the exact opposite things of what they're saying now.

42:37

Now, they will bristle at that. But you put their words as they were written in the context of 2010.

42:45

And it says the exact opposite of what they're saying in 2021. They're the ones that have changed, not us, them.

42:54

And so this is what we're looking at today. And so I took the time this morning to put up a little blog article.

43:08

And so we'll spend the rest of our time fleshing this out a little bit because I had to be brief in writing it this morning.

43:20

But you've heard a lot of anti -woke discussions that are based on Colossians 3, that are based on Ephesians 3 and 4, maybe 2, the unity of the body, things along those lines.

43:40

And all of those are absolutely valid. They're accurate. They're right. The emphasis is upon what unifies

43:49

Christians. This is the difference between critical theory and anyone who would call critical theory a useful tool.

43:55

It's actually emblematic of a worldview. It flows from a worldview that is acidic to the

44:04

Christian world. That's all there is to it. And so you've heard those.

44:10

Hopefully, you're able to explicate those passages yourself.

44:18

But I thought of another text just recently, and I wanted to bring it to your attention.

44:28

So I put it in the form of an article. And it comes from Paul writing to the

44:35

Corinthians. Now, the Corinthians, the church at Corinth, was a truly metropolitan church.

44:45

Corinth has access to the sea. It is right on trade routes.

44:54

And as a result of that, it was a major religious center. There were numerous temples in Corinth.

45:03

And hence, there was a tremendous amount of travel to and from Corinth. Pilgrimages, people coming to worship in these temples.

45:12

And that means that it would be a little bit like my experience years ago in walking down the streets of London.

45:19

The number of different languages that you would hear from people walking past you is just astonishing.

45:26

Really, really was. Beautiful, but astonishing. And so Corinth would have been a majority

45:36

Greek city, obviously. But it would have had all sorts of other people in that church in Corinth, because it was found in the city that would have all these different kinds of ethnicities, religions, every shape and shade of mankind, with the possible exception of white, literally, would be found in Corinth.

46:07

Greeks are tan. They're not white. You can tell the difference between someone from Norway and someone from Greece.

46:16

It's pretty easy to do. So, you would have

46:23

Caucasians, but they'd be more from Russia, the Caucasus Mountains, than they would be from what we would identify as the white areas of northern

46:34

Europe. Anyway, Paul writes two lengthy letters and probably a third that we don't have.

46:43

So, you have what's called the Corinthian canon. You have those letters that were written by an apostle to Corinth.

46:49

And it's interesting, you could throw Clement in there if you'd like to. It's a letter written from Rome to Corinth as well, because Corinth continued having problems even after the apostles were gone.

47:02

And so, you have a lot of information about Corinth, a lot of information about the

47:09

Corinthians, and about the issues that they faced. And hence, it is interesting that it is to the

47:18

Corinthians, with all of their issues, they had issues regarding religion.

47:27

They had issues regarding food sacrificed to idols. Almost any meat that you would buy in Corinth would have been sacrificed to idols, because the temples were so busy.

47:44

The priests certainly couldn't eat all of that. And so, the people would bring their sacrifices, they would be sacrificed to the idols, and then that meat would be sold by the temple.

47:52

That's how the temple supported itself, and that's what ended up in the meat market. So, you had the issues that that raised, when you had people...

48:03

What if one of those butchers that worked in one of the temples is converted to the message of Christ?

48:11

What does he do when he sees that meat? And he knows where it came from. He might even recognize the people that prepared it.

48:18

They might know him by name. What does he do? There's another issue.

48:25

There was temple prostitution, both heterosexual and homosexual.

48:32

Isn't it interesting? Where do you have Paul talking about malakoi and arsenokoites?

48:38

1 Corinthians chapter 6, to the same church. And such were some of you.

48:45

Were there former temple prostitutes who were now Christians? Undoubtedly. Undoubtedly.

48:52

That may be part of the issue of the hair discussion in writing to the

49:00

Corinthians, and women needing to have that sign. Because some sources indicated that at least some of those temple prostitutes, the women, shaved their heads.

49:12

Maybe that was an androgynous type thing, with the sexual deviancy of the temples.

49:18

I don't know. But the point is, if they're converted, it takes time for their hair to become long again, to look like a female.

49:25

Maybe it has been suggested that the reason the women would recover their heads was because if you see a bunch of still primarily bald women going into that meeting over there, and you find out that's one of the

49:39

Christian house churches, you go, oh we know what's going on there, because we know who those women are.

49:44

See? So there were issues. There were tough issues that Paul has to address when he's writing to the

49:53

Corinthians, aside from the internal problems that they were having. So just think of all the woke issues that are right on the surface, as Paul writes to the church at this metropolitan city in the ancient

50:13

Roman Empire, right there in the heart of Greece. So he talks about the body.

50:23

He talks about the body. He does not for a second envision the idea, not for a second envision the idea that what you should do is you should have separate

50:36

Christian churches. Where, well, we will have one Christian church over here for the

50:42

Jews, and we'll have one Christian church over here for Gentiles who weren't involved with the temple worship, and then we'll have another one over here for those who were, and here's one for people who have a problem with the eating of the meat, and here's one that doesn't, and no.

50:59

That's never ever an option. Self -segregation is apostasy. Self -segregation is rebellion.

51:09

Instead, what does he talk about? There's one body. There's one body. So here in 1

51:16

Corinthians chapter 12, for even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though there are many, are one body, so also is

51:25

Christ. For by one spirit we are all baptized in one body, whether Jews or Greeks or the slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one spirit.

51:32

Here's unity. Ta soma hen estin.

51:38

The body is one. Has many members. We're all members of the body, but though there are many, they're one body, so also is

51:49

Christ. One spirit. We are all baptized into one body. That possession of the

51:56

Spirit of God, baptism in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

52:04

One body. Not divided. Not Jew, Greek, not slave, not free.

52:10

One body. One table. One Lord. Get that in Ephesians as well.

52:19

No concept. No room anywhere for some kind of self -division so that we can avoid microaggressions.

52:32

Do you think for even a second that those former temple prostitutes, when they went to the service, were not well aware of what their past was?

52:47

Do you think they didn't see some men who also had been converted that they had been with in the temple?

52:56

Do you think it would have been easier for them to have had their own little separate place, their safe space to go?

53:07

Yeah, probably. Paul says, nope. Can't do it. Cannot do it.

53:14

Not possible. In the midst of all this, he's talking about this one body, and he's talking about the gifts that are given by God to that body.

53:24

So starting all the way up here, where to one is given a word of wisdom through the

53:30

Spirit, to another the word of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one

53:35

Spirit, to another the effecting of miracles, and to another prophesying, to another distinguishing of spirits, to other various kinds of tongues, and to another the interpretation of tongues.

53:44

So all these gifts are given by one Spirit. There aren't multiple Spirits. There's only one

53:50

Spirit. But notice verse 11, and this is very important.

53:57

But one and the same Spirit works all these things, distributing to each one individually, just as he wills.

54:10

Just as he wills. Now, some of you will recognize that what we have here is one of the key texts demonstrating the personality of the

54:27

Holy Spirit. So you have all these things are energi, they are energized, they're accomplished by ta -hen -kai -ta -au -tau.

54:42

That's by one and the same Spirit. So the one, the same

54:50

Spirit that does the giving of all the gifts, accomplishes these things, and he distributes, he distributes to each one just as, and here's the key term that we need to keep in mind, and there it is, as he wills.

55:21

As he wills. Not as it wills, that's what the

55:27

New World Translation says, but it's don't will. I guess the

55:33

New World Translators just couldn't come up with a way to get around this. I mean, there's no textual variant that allows you to get out of it.

55:43

So they have just as it wills. But it's don't will. People will.

55:50

Persons will. And so the Spirit, one the same

55:56

Spirit, works all these things, and he distributes these gifts as he wills.

56:05

Not as we will, but as he wills. So this is the action of a person, and since these are divine gifts given to the body, this means the

56:18

Spirit is divine, and the Spirit is sovereign. The Spirit is personal. One of the key texts in the

56:25

New Testament that demonstrates the personality of the Holy Spirit of God. You'll notice there's nothing here about ethnicities.

56:35

There's nothing here about structures of oppression or power. The Spirit wills to give the gifts, and he is not constrained by anything else.

56:51

The Spirit gives the gifts just as he wills to the church for the building up of the body, bringing the body together, making it that one body of Christ.

57:08

So there you have an important text, but then I noticed something else.

57:14

So you've got verse 11, but one the same Spirit works all these things, distributing each one individually just as he wills. Go down just a couple of sentences to verse 18.

57:25

A couple sentences to verse 18, and here you have, but now

57:32

God has placed, so here's

57:42

God is doing this, and up in verse 11, and our guy was also something that the

57:48

Spirit's doing, the members, each one of them in the body just as what?

58:00

As God himself wills, just as he desires, just as he wills.

58:10

So as in so many other places, Paul can, in Romans 8, for example, it's well known that Paul switches between the

58:21

Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ within a couple sentences, and there's no difference in what he's referring to.

58:27

There's no theological significance to the differentiation. The fact that he differentiates and doesn't have a reason for still doing is theologically significant for obvious reasons.

58:37

And the same way here, God places the body, but places the parts in the body just as he wills.

58:46

The Spirit gives the just as he wills. They're different terms. Bulleti, this is this is stello, but they're frequently used in very similar fashions.

58:56

But the point is, in both instances, God is absolutely sovereign. Now once again, this is written to the church at Corinth.

59:06

The church at Corinth would have had all sorts of woke issues that they would have been facing, that they would have been dealing with, but the answer is never what we're told by woke people today.

59:22

It's never self -segregation. It's never white supremacy. Here it would have to have been

59:28

Greek supremacy, right? Or maybe Jewish supremacy, because the Messiah came from the

59:33

Jews. I mean, but what has Paul already said? There's no Jew -Greek. There's no slaver -free.

59:40

Yes, this is written to people where slavery, there had to have been tens of thousands of slaves in Corinth to keep that city running.

59:54

And that means there were a bunch of slaves, chattel -owned slaves in the church at Corinth, which is why he will say, hey, if you can become free, great.

01:00:07

But whatever state you're in when you're called, be content. If you can become free, become free.

01:00:14

But if you can't become free, then you are the Lord's freed man, whereas the one who embraces

01:00:20

Christ as a free man becomes the Lord's slave. That is

01:00:26

Paul's teaching. Paul would fail all the woke tests today, which is why, of course, he does in most of these seminaries, and why he is disliked so much in those contexts.

01:00:43

So here is just one of the many, many, many places where we see, you know,

01:00:52

I've talked to you about the Scythian test. Let's see if a teaching or a teacher passes the

01:00:58

Scythian test, that you look at Colossians, and there is no Scythian. There's no barbarian.

01:01:05

There's no Jew, no Greek. The Scythians were a warlike people, and you could have easily, there would be all sorts of people in Colossae, in Corinth, who would know who the

01:01:17

Scythians were and would have reason to separate from them and demand reparations from them from stuff that happened in the past or whatever else it might be.

01:01:27

And if your teaching would result in a divided apostolic church in opposition to the teaching of Apostle Paul, then you fail the

01:01:35

Scythian test, and your teaching should be rejected. Well, here's another test. Corinth is a metropolitan city with all sorts of different perspectives and ethnicities and backgrounds and social standings and everything else, and yet, will your teaching produce the unity?

01:01:56

Does your teaching have as its foundation one spirit who sovereignly gives the gifts?

01:02:04

One God who places the members in the body as he wills?

01:02:12

Or do we get to engage in identity theology and change all of that?

01:02:19

That's the question that we're facing today. This isn't the kind of thing you get from the woke folks.

01:02:28

This isn't the kind of thing you get from advocates of CRT. You're not going to see

01:02:33

Anthony Bradley actually interact with Bodhi Balcombe's book. He's not going to do it. It is far easier to mock.

01:02:44

Looks like Arabic up there. It's far easier to just mock and try to get people to not read it than it is to actually interact with it and refute it, because to refute it, now you've got to go into the biblical arguments that he made and the citations that were used.

01:03:02

Whoa! And stuff like that. That was a little faster than you expected, yes.

01:03:10

We're still playing with the toys in the back, so you're not going to get that kind of response, but that doesn't mean that we don't press on and continue to speak the truth.

01:03:26

All pray for Grace Life Church. Pray for all the believers up in Canada and, of course, everywhere else where these draconian, tyrannical, live by lies demands are being made of Christians everywhere.

01:03:44

Folks, don't live by lies. When you discover that something's a lie, you can't live by it. And you may have to pay to not live by it, but that's the way it is.

01:03:54

That's the way it is. Thanks for watching the program today. Lord willing, they'll let this one get posted, and it'll be up there for a while.

01:04:00

We continue to try to fly under the radar. That will not happen for long. Always remember where aomin .org

01:04:06

is so that when you find out that a program wasn't posted or something like that, you know where to go to find out how to find our content once Big Tech says, okay, you're next on the list, because it will happen eventually.