Christian Nationalism, Sacralism, and Christian Maturity

Alpha & Omega Ministries iconAlpha & Omega Ministries

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Tackled the ever so easy, light issues of “White evangelicals,” Christian Nationalism, sacralism, and the recent dust-ups that had Reformed men posting clown-shoe memes about other Reformed men (all causing the angels in heaven to weep, me thinks). Had to do some eschatology and a lot more, but the fact is, it is indeed Christ or chaos, we must witness to the state what Christ demands, and we must live out what obedience looks like.

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00:31
Well, greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. I suppose I should put the microphone up where it's actually somewhat useful. Already been doing stuff today here in the studio and have a whole lot more to be doing today.
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It's going to be a busy, busy day, but hopefully somewhat of a better day than yesterday was on social media.
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It was a day to remember, a day which shall live in infamy, to use some language.
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It just seems to me that, I'll just be honest with you,
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I'm not sure that we were ever designed to use stuff like social media.
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You know, with all the warnings going on about AI, which, as far as I can tell, well, the biggest danger of AI is actually making
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Terminator come true, basically. Don't even get me into that right now.
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That's a whole different subject. But, you think about how fast
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AI can produce a document or something like that. And, I think the time's going to come when
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Christians especially are going to be needing to make the strong argument of the goodness of natural, and then fill in the blank, natural marriage, natural birth, natural death, natural education, natural literature, natural music.
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We're going to have to be making the argument that human beings are meant to reflect
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God's glory and to think God's thoughts after him, not
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AI. I think that's going to be, it's right on the doorstep that we're going to be needing to make those arguments.
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And, I just think part of it is there are numerous passages of scripture that tell us that anger does not fulfill
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God's righteousness, a person who's swift to speak and slow to hear, that there is wisdom, there is goodness in taking time to contemplate and to consider, and maybe just not responding immediately.
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How many times have all of us, every single one of us, that are involved in any kind of communication?
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And, look, when was it? Was that Saturday night when
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I tweeted about the video that John Cooper sent me, that John Cooper and Seth Morrison from Skillet sent me.
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They were performing in Manchester, and they had this wonderful conversation afterwards with a woman whose daughter had started listening to the divining line, listening to Apology Radio, had been converted, led to Christ, and then was baptized in secret because everything was locked down.
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They literally did the baptism in the snow in a garden. It was super encouraging.
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I sent that off to Jeff and the other pastors, and it was really, really, really encouraging to hear that kind of thing.
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And how would she have known about John and I's relationship if it weren't for the internet,
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YouTube, social media, stuff like that? We have opportunities of reaching people all around the world right now.
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That's awesome. So there's all sorts of good, positive things. Twitter is a much more useful place as far as getting information out than it was before Elon Musk bought it.
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And so we can be thankful for things like that. But at the same time, when it comes to how
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Christians interact with other Christians, how many times have we all, a week, 10 days, a month after something, sat back and gone, if I just hadn't responded so quickly?
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Because there's a built -in bias to quick response, right? So, in a debate, when
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Jerry Madatix, in the late 90s, was just driving the entire room mad because he's dancing around the fact that these
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Marian dogmas he's trying to defend developed long after the time period we're talking about. And everybody in the room knows it.
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And so I'm walking through, did anybody in the 2nd century? Did anybody in the 3rd century? And he goes, well, Mr. White, I don't have to show that all the early church fathers believed
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X, Y, or Z. And I said, Jerry, I'll take just one. And it was one of those situations where the place had been building and everybody's just getting really frustrated.
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And then, boom, you have that, it would not have carried the same kind of weight had
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I waited till the closing statements to make that statement. So yeah, there sort of is a built -in bias for the gotcha, the quick strike, the fast right hand, something like that, right?
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But that often leads to, especially as Christians converse with other Christians, the kind of divisiveness that, let's just be honest with ourselves, sometimes something will happen and what actually started the division may become irrelevant shortly thereafter.
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It may be not something that was at all earth shattering at all, but we tend to stay focused upon that offense and stay offended.
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And the divisions can remain for a long period of time. So the behavior that I have seen just over the past 48 hours amongst
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Christians just shouldn't ought to be. And I don't care which side you're on.
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I find myself in between. And these days, look, folks, half the terms that we're using today, none of us had ever heard of three years ago, had ever even heard of.
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And it's very clear that there are all sorts of nuanced and even competing definitions of the same phrase.
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You'll have people utilizing descriptions of themselves, and you know this other person uses the same terminology, but there's no way those two people use possibly the same things.
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So there aren't agreed upon definitions. What's worse, for years and years and years and years,
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I avoided almost any discussion of eschatology. Now, you can't do that.
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We're seeing right now that eschatology has a huge impact on how you end up looking at what's going on in your determination of what's the purpose of the church, what's the future of the church, all these types of things.
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And so you can't ignore it anymore. But the problem is a lot of people have preconceptions, prejudices, biases, and there's probably not another area that I have encountered in all of Christian theology where there is more confusion and lack of communication and everything else than the area of eschatology.
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And so when I hear people describing my eschatology, the vast majority of the time,
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I'm like, no, no, no, don't think so. Now, I know that there are different schools within post -millennialism, and therefore, you know, it's like reading the
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Puritans. There were different understandings that they had of their great hope, and they didn't necessarily agree with one another perfectly.
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And if you dispy pre -millers are sitting out there going, oh, that's your problem. Yeah, okay.
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There's 147 ,000 different variations on that theme. And if you want to see people getting ready to get out the long knives, literally watch the people having debates about pre -trib, mid -trib, post -trib, blah, blah, blah, blah, and condemning each other to hell, for crying out loud.
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The arm millers don't tend to do too much of that, you know, in general.
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But still, right now, you've got a bunch of people that are struggling with new terminology and new realities.
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And I had never even heard the term Christian nationalist until just a couple years ago.
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I don't think any more than two years ago. I don't think so, anyways. When I first heard it,
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I was like, what now? What is this now? And that means it's still being defined.
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Stephen Wolfe's definition is not other people's definitions. Stephen Wolfe is a
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Thomist. And so he's more into classical apologetics.
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It makes a huge difference. There's a big, big area. So we've got all sorts of new terminology.
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We've got all sorts of new pressures coming against us. And we aren't doing a really good job having overly useful communicative discussions.
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Let's just be honest. The tendency is to start breaking into tribes and circle the wagons and start shooting.
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And there was just a bunch of going on yesterday. A .D. Robles, I responded to a meme that he put out.
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G3 getting ready to go on Twitter and it was a clown putting his shoes on. And my response was, stop it.
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Just stop it. This is accomplishing nothing. It's getting us nowhere.
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It's putting us backwards. Just stop with the memes.
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And when I responded to what Stephen Wolfe said, we'll start with that. Well, we've already started, haven't we?
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But when I responded to that, oh man, the people started coming out of the woodwork.
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Oh, I can see what you think about your people. My people? What do you mean my people?
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Oh, whites. Oh, please, excuse me while I throw up a little bit in my mouth.
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Oh, well, we can see what you think about your people. Let me tell you something, dude, whoever you were, and I didn't even care who you were.
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I'm sure I blocked you pretty well instantly. You know who my people are?
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Aside from my wife and my children and my grandchildren, my people are the members of Apologia Church.
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And then my people are all the other churches that worship
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God in spirit and in truth. And it has nothing and will never have anything to do with the tone of the color of my skin.
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You know, right now, my very, very, very heavily Scottish ancestry is embarrassing to me.
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You see what Scotland's doing these days? So much for freedom and liberty, William Wallace would be chopping people to bits in Scotland right now.
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This whole my people garbage, my people is
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Samuel Say, my people is Kofi, my people are Hispanics, and my people is
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Oscar, one of our deacons at the church. You've seen him doing debates and stuff like that. It has nothing to do with the color of your skin or where your grandpappy came from.
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And if that's all your people are, I feel sorry for you. I feel really sorry for you. But very clearly, the racists started coming out of the woodwork.
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So what was the statement? Let's start. We got to get to it here. Stephen Wolf, who, by the way,
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I had to go looking for this screenshot because I can't see Stephen Wolf's tweets anymore. He has protected his account.
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And I'm not one of the people now privileged to look upon his tweets. That's a bad look. The day after posting something like this, and then you go into hiding.
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Bad look, really bad look. Doesn't help at all. But you know, he posted the
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Norman Rockwell picture of a room full of white people. And one of them, simple looking man, just a regular working man is speaking.
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I don't know what the background of it is. Looks like it's in a school someplace because there's a blackboard in the back.
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In fact, if I'm looking at it here, I think that's a eraser over on the left -hand side.
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But anyway, it was a short statement. And that's the problem.
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If we've learned anything from Tim Keller over the past two years, it's throw out a short statement that has one obvious meaning, but could have all sorts of sub meanings.
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And then when everybody goes nuts, come back and say, Oh, I just obviously meant this.
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And if you read it that way, it must mean there's something wrong with you. How many times has that happened?
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You just automatically go, Oh, I do. I wasn't referring to that. Okay. So Stephen Wolfe posted this and said, white evangelicals are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America.
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Now, Stephen Wolfe claims to be a Christian, claims to be reformed.
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And the silly rest of us went and interpreted his words, not as some vanilla observation of voting blocks.
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Because I mean, none of us, none of us have ever sat back and gone, what do they think evangelical is in this poll?
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I mean, how many times have we sat there going, well, how can they even think that someone believes like that is an evangelical?
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But what are they talking about? So the majority of us are going to sit back and go, this is a self -professing
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Christian. And so I'm going to interpret his words as words coming from a self -professing
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Christian. And therefore I'm going to look at this line and I'm going to go, white evangelicals?
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How about black evangelicals? Because a black evangelical who really believes the gospel and practices,
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I'm not talking about the wild, crazy, political black church. Because there is a political black church.
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You see it all the time. You see these people, you know, right from the pulpit saying, you need to vote for this person and that person.
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And you need to defend abortion and you need to defend LGBTQ rights. And, you know, they're just leftist radicals.
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Well, they're not evangelicals for crying out loud. They may be religious people. They may talk about Jesus, but they don't believe anything
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Jesus taught. They don't live it anyways. So there are black evangelicals actually believing orthodox gospel preaching black evangelicals.
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And they pay more to stand against moral insanity in America than the rest of us do.
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Because they get called every name under the book. I've watched it.
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Look what happens to Samuel Say, look what happens to Kofi when they speak out. And the look to Kdub, Chris in Texas.
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Look what happens to these guys, to Daryl, Omaha. What happens to them?
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The terms and the insults that are thrown at them far more than any of the rest of us get thrown at us.
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They're not a bulwark. Oh, but what, what, what was the, what was the defense yesterday?
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It was just simply a description of demographics. He was just simply talking about voting patterns.
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Well, he didn't put that in his tweet, did he? And that's purposeful. You know, that's purposeful.
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He didn't. He posted a picture from Norman Rockwell, not a graphic of some kind of, of poll that we could then go, okay, who did the poll?
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What questions were they asking? Is there any meaningful foundation here? Nothing. None of that was given.
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So again, for all of you who have come after me, because I wrote a fairly lengthy tweet and attacked me for it.
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Look, Stephen Wolf wrote this on purpose. He's not a stupid person. He did this on purpose.
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And, you know, this one guy, I assume it's a guy, I don't know, quote treated my response and said, blah, blah, blah.
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Race blind boomer Christianity has led to importing the global South and infinity
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Africans and the decline of the West. This is cultural suicide. I detest these people.
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So brought out the people who are, well, white supremacists, sounds like.
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And they came crawling out to go, Oh, you terrible people.
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Some other guy. Anyway, there were numerous responses.
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And I think that's exactly what was wanted. And that's certainly what was, was achieved. So there are
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Hispanic evangelicals and there are Asian evangelicals. But the point is, if you're using the term evangelical, you're using a theological term.
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Remember, this is the author of Christian nationalism. Now he said in the book, and this is one of its fatal flaws.
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I'm not going to be doing much in the way of exegesis. I'm just going to assume such and such.
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Well, you assumed reform theology, which should have warned you before pressing the send button, that there was something really wrong with what you were saying.
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Lone bulwark against moral insanity in America. A couple other real problems with this one sentence.
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Political groups are not bulwarks. The moral insanity in America only has one possible answer to it.
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And it has nothing to do with the color of anyone's skin at all.
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So if you're going to deal with moral insanity, only the gospel, only the gospel can do that.
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Nothing else can even begin to start the process. So it was a theological statement all along.
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And hence, the very insertion of the name white was what the issue, that was a problem.
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Bible -believing, practicing Christians are the lone bulwark against moral insanity in America.
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That would have been a true statement. And we wouldn't be talking about it right now.
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So why say it? Why even put that out there? Why even do just the tremendous damage to any kind of discussion?
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I mean, if you're one of those people trying to push this idea of Christian nationalism, this is not what you need by a long shot.
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This just feeds into everybody else saying, just a buzzword for white supremacy.
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But if you want bulwarks against moral insanity in America, it all has to do with who's preaching the gospel.
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And if you're sitting there saying it's only white evangelicals, or as someone did later, there was a good meme that was posted later which had a number of white evangelicals on it that are anything but a bulwark against moral insanity in America.
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There's all sorts of people who identify as white evangelicals that really aren't.
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But the issue is what is the evangel in those situations? So again, the only way to defend this kind of statement is we're only talking about generic, societally defined voting blocs.
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Well, okay. The problem is white
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Americans are still pretty much the majority in the United States. Sort of half and half now or something like that.
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But as far, if all you're saying is it seems that amongst those who identify as evangelicals and who are white, there is more of a tendency to resist progressivism than there is amongst blacks.
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Well, all of my black brothers would say, yeah, that's for sure. We live that reality every single day.
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I'm not sure that that would be at all true amongst Hispanics. I mean,
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I know there's lots of leftist liberal Hispanics, but there's also just a lot of Hispanics with just good old, plain old common sense that go, that stuff's stupid because it is.
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But there just was no reason whatsoever for the white moniker and it just created tremendous problems.
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When Stephen Wolf opens his Twitter back up, maybe there'll be conversations about that, but I just found it fascinating that he now has locked things down.
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What can I say? I think that says a lot in of itself. All right.
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I wasn't going to be talking about that, but I had to because it blew up yesterday. What I had, and by the way, just before I leave that, some
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Twitter account by the name of The Majesty's Men.
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Chance to earn an easy, maybe $100. We've many beloved brothers of all skin shades choosing a hostile stance against this statement.
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The statement was Stephen Wolf's statement. You can't see it anymore because he's locked it down.
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Seemingly missing the simple point and making ethnic intrinsic value arguments where there were none.
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Well, it could have been written in a way to actually communicate that, huh? If you interpreted it as coming from a
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Christian who would have a biblical definition of evangelical, you can't go running off to some other excuse.
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So in the spirit of brotherly love, ecumenism and furthering one another's understanding, can anyone make a legit case here for any other demographic being a true bulwark against total moral insanity in the
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US? As if any demographic is. There is no demographic that's a bulwark.
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None. If in the United States, which was and has been for a long, long time, a majority, quote unquote, white nation, whatever that means.
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I mean, it really doesn't have any meaning. European, basically, but that doesn't mean white.
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Silly. But anyhow, if it was a majority white nation, then and was not founded upon the principles of Roman Catholicism, therefore it's
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Protestant. Remember WASP? White, Anglo -Saxon, Protestant. Remember that one? Those would obviously be the ones who are more desirous of maintaining the standards and the traditions of the
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United States of America. So how could there, since they're the majority, how could there be a greater majority amongst another group?
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It doesn't make any sense. But again, theologically, if something's going to act as a bulwark against moral insanity, it has to have a spiritual nature.
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And that's why the white part is irrelevant. And not only useless, but damaging to bring that into the fold.
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So anyways, we'll send you $100 if you can make a case. Well, it looks like a lot of people are doing silly stuff with making offers of money.
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Someone just posted a picture of ransom on Twitter. So hey, you see your youngest grandson. I was like, ah, we could not get him to smile during that photo shoot for nothing.
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He's normally such a smiley baby, has a beautiful smile, very, very happy, but was like, why are we in the desert?
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And why is everyone dressed up? And why are you all acting so very strangely? Yeah. Anyway, so before Stephen Wolfe blew everything up yesterday,
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I had announced that I was going to walk a tightrope today. And again, if I was a smart man, which
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I'm not, I would find a way to be doing some discussion.
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Well, you know, one thing I do want to do, I want to, in fact, I've wanted to ask somebody in the chat channel to do this for me.
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I want to track down my debate with Mitch Pacwa from January of 1991.
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A lot of you people listening weren't around back then. So I can grab the cross -examination period and play a question that I've referred to over and over and over again that I asked
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Mitch Pacwa in that justification debate. I still want to do that. But I would have done something like that.
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I would have maybe done a quick study on a passage in the Quran, anything to just let what was going on just pass me by.
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Because from most perspectives, I have got nothing to gain by addressing what was going on between Joel Webbin and Josh Weiss.
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Why do I have nothing to gain? Because I'm supposed to be speaking at Joel Webbin's conference in a matter of weeks, early
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May. So it's one of the first stops on my way across the
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U .S. in a conference on post -millennialism and theonomy. And then in September, I'm supposed to be a plenary speaker at the
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G3 conference on the sovereignty of God in Atlanta. So wisdom, at least as it's been interpreted in the past, would probably be stay out of it.
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But like I said, I'm not all that smart. And what
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I'm watching is, in the center, the people who are really definitional of where the disagreement is, we're doing all right.
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I mean, we have to be able to disagree and argue and to have conversations.
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And Joel had said, hey, I'll have you on my program. Let's talk about it, Josh. I'm more than willing to say, hey, if there's any kind of discomfort with one side being on the other's program or vice versa, maybe this program could be a good place where both people could be on.
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And I can sort of get things going because I don't know
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Joel all that well at all. But I've spoken at G3 now.
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Goodness, I don't even remember when I started, but it's been many, many years.
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And yet the position that I hold, at least eschatologically, is very much
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Joel Webben's position. And so maybe I could facilitate the conversation.
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Maybe this brief discussion I'm going to give now would help to open some of those doors.
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But look, I, for example, teach in a seminary that has professors that are dispensational pre -mill,
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I'm ill, and I think I'm the only postie. So I have never been one of those people.
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Part of it was because I came out of a background of independent fundamentalist
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Baptist mindset, where you determined who your brothers and sisters were by how they looked, who they associated with, rather than the consistency of their living out a common faith.
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And I don't want that. I react against that. And so I have a inborn reaction against that background, which gives me a certain level of Catholicity.
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That's why I can work with Michael Brown, and I can work with Doug Wilson, and I can work with a wide variety of people because I don't sit there,
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I don't have a checklist. I'm sitting there going, well, okay, what's his eschatology?
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What's his view on it? Well, what's his view on Thomas? Well, that's a big one now, huh? And, you know, all this kind of stuff.
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That does not mean that I don't have parameters. That does not mean that there are no guidelines to go with.
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But obviously, I think there are certain definitional, central issues.
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And as long as we can minister the gospel together in that way, we can talk about the other stuff, we can have debates about the other stuff, but not to throw somebody under the orthodoxy bus in the process.
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So what needs to happen is there needs to be an open discussion about definitions that I didn't see happening.
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So the quote -unquote
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Christian nationalist perspective, and Joel says he doesn't necessarily like that terminology, but he'll wear the label if there's nothing else to use to describe the position.
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When I and Doug Wilson discussed Stephen Wolfe's book when it first came out on the
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Svartovets Dialogues, I thought, and I still think we are,
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I read his new book, Mere Christendom, last weekend. I thought we were fairly close.
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Obviously, I have more active Baptist tendencies.
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He was once a Baptist, but I think he's managed to cut out most of that stuff over the years.
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I have more Baptist tendencies toward what we'll talk about a little bit later when we talk about sacralism and stuff like that.
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But we both agreed on that program, Doug Wilson and I, that the only way for this to actually work, for there to be a
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Mere Christendom, is as the result of a massive work of the Spirit of God, a great awakening on a global scale, which is not happening right now.
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Okay? It's not happening right now. And so from my perspective, our calling in the church is prophetic.
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We are to be a prophetic voice. We are to witness to the magistrates of what
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God's law says, of what is good and what is honest and what is just, no matter what that costs.
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And that may be very costly. It may become much more costly over time.
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But that's our calling. And we can't, there's not even any really much of a reason right now to be arguing some of the fine points that we're arguing about as to how exactly things are going to work out 200 years from now.
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If and when, well, it's only when God in his majesty and in his sovereignty moves to bring about this massive spiritual awakening.
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Because you can't, you can't talk about these things outside of that spiritual awakening.
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So the problem is, see that's where I'm coming from. I think that's where Doug's coming from.
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I don't know that's where Stephen Wolfe is coming from. I don't think it necessarily is.
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It's one thing to sit back and go, look, it's either Christian nationalism or secular nationalism or really not even secular nationalism, secular globalism.
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Those are the choices and that's true. And we're seeing the absurdity, the death that comes from allowing secularism to define things.
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There's no question about that. So there needs to be an openness on our part to say to the world, it is
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Christ or chaos. This idea that we can not call the civil magistrate to obedience to the law of Christ, they are going to have a law and that law will either flow from the culture of life, which is found only in Christ or the culture of death.
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And if we can't see that secularism is anti -human, anti -Christian and utterly destructive because it can only create and produce the culture of death.
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I don't know what we've been looking at. I mean, fire up Twitter, for 10 minutes and you will see it.
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I have my Twitter feed right now set.
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I have this, I put this, I don't know how long I got it, but I can set it to refresh one of the tabs every certain amount of time.
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That's how I keep Twitter up to date. And this, a video has popped up, unfortunately, of some creep, some sexual pervert doing a story hour thing.
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Okay. Thankfully it's gone. It's now been replaced by the late Dr. Stanley, Dr.
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Charles Stanley, who passed away and our condolences to his family and his church. And, you know, the
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Lord did use Charles Stanley in many, many ways and we can be thankful for that.
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Anyway, I'm glad to have Dr. Stanley sitting there on my
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Twitter feed for the next 90 seconds rather than what was. But that's what we're going to get.
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That's what you're going to get. Darwin opened the door to it and that's all you can get from that.
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So the church needs to be a prophetic voice to the state. Here is
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God's law and here is what will happen when you do not follow God's law. Now there is a vast difference.
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I believe in the sphere of sovereignty. I believe that there does need to be a separation between church and state, but that does not mean that the state
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Lords over the church. And it does not mean that the state does not listen. The state must listen to know how to have
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God's blessing. This nation once understood what it meant to call for God's blessing, to pray for God's blessing.
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Has no idea what that means today. And so if we keep going this direction, the result will be the utter destruction of anything that promotes life.
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And you get to start all over again, rebuild from the ground up.
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And that may be exactly what has to happen. As costly in life and treasure and advancement as that may be, there is no way that this current state can continue as it is.
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It's self -destructive. It's self -destructive. We all saw it this morning.
44:49
Mr. Thomas, what was his actual name again? I forget what it was. Will, Will Thomas, sitting there with pink hair and a female top on saying something about trans athletes need to be in sports or something like that, claiming victim status.
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Here's a guy destroying women's sports. And we sit here and we're angered.
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We're angered at the stupidity and the insanity and the just, it's a lie.
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And we all know it. Everybody knows it. A two -year -old knows it, but we're told we have to believe it.
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Can't last. It can't last. It won't last. This society will crumble from within and be taken over by those from without.
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And I hope that in the future people will be able to look and see this is what happens. This is what brought about.
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So all of that said, you can go listen to a sermon
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I preached just, I think less than two years ago now, honestly, on my hope for the future.
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Key texts, 1 Corinthians chapter 15 and Psalm 110, Psalm 2,
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Isaiah 42, all these texts that indicate to me that the last enemy that we put under Jesus' feet is death and that he is reigning and that that's not merely a spiritual type of a situation.
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We can go through all of that and I'm sure that that will be part of the discussion prior to G3 because GBTS is having a discussion of church and state on the
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Thursday before G3. Well, it's part of G3, obviously. It was called a pre -conference, whatever.
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And since Josh Bice is now one of my fellow professors at GBTS, I'm sure this will be part of the discussion.
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And the neat thing is that'll be, wow, five years. Yeah, because we did the
47:11
CRT thing in 2018. Was it 2018?
47:17
I think it was 2018. And so we've got a basis upon which to have that discussion.
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And what you're going to see is that the differences in emphasis and sometimes in conclusion will come down to your eschatology.
47:35
You can't skip that part and it's there. The problem is, okay, now
47:42
I need to offer some corrected to some folks. I don't know what you're reading about post -millennialism, but one of the common mythologies is that post -millennialism teaches that things just keep getting better and better and better until Jesus comes back.
48:00
Church history shows you that's not the case. Now, things are a whole lot better today as far as the reach of the church and the size of the church than a thousand years ago.
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There's a general trend, but there can be deep valleys, deep valleys of judgment.
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And I think we may be going into one of the deepest valleys of judgment that will then produce a monument that says secularism can never, ever, ever be allowed to rise again because this is what it does.
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Look at what happened. Look at the disaster. Okay, so we have that, but at the same time, that doesn't mean then that we want any form that destroys sphere sovereignty.
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Now, this is where I, as a Baptist post -millennialist, might have a bit of a insight for some others.
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And that is what I don't see mere
49:28
Christendom being. And I don't like that term Christendom. I'll be honest with you. There was no massive outpouring of the
49:39
Spirit of God leading to repentance and faith that led to the eventual development of the political, religious concept of sacralism during the medieval period.
49:58
Let me repeat that because it's important. Because see, I'm saying, when Doug and I were talking, we're talking about a massive outpouring of the
50:05
Spirit of God and revival in the future that leads to mass conversion that then allows for a meaningful application, not for the joining of the church and state, but for the state to order itself in such a fashion as to honor
50:29
God because the majority of its citizens want to do that. And they want
50:34
God's blessing. If you want more discussion of what's called a form of Christian libertarianism, theonomic libertarianism, if you can believe there would be such a thing, see what
50:52
Joe Booth's written in Mission of God about how religious minorities would live in a context like that.
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It's important stuff to read. Anyway, that's not sacralism.
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That's not a confusion of church and state. What you had during the medieval period up to the time of the
51:20
Reformation and even after the Reformation, including in Protestant countries, was a form of sacralism.
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It's an intermixture where offices in the church were created that had specific governmental and political powers.
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And the pope, of course, could make the heads of state bow before him or use the interdict to destroy their nations.
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Sacralism was a disaster. And I'm not talking about sacralism.
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And most of the time when amillennialists and premillennialists are criticizing postmillennialism because they're saying that postmillennialism is saying that we need a sacral society.
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We need that confusion of church and state, breaking down the barriers, rather than the healthy and appropriate recognition of the differences of those spheres.
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And yet the reality that Christ's law is relevant in all of them and must be applied in all of them.
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So I looked up, because I don't think I've ever played this. And you know what?
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I just realized, come on, work. There you go.
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Need to make sure to send the audio where it needs to go. And it's ironic.
52:54
Not yet. I will in a second. Do you see it? Okay. Okay.
53:05
Okay. All right. Rich was on another planet. Oh, don't make excuses.
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Oh, they're playing music next door? Oh, and you thought that was me? No. Yeah. No. Anyway, what's going to be funny about this?
53:35
This was 2017. I look so different.
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I was uninjured as yet. I was running and riding and rowing. That was wonderful.
53:50
Anyway, this is a four minute, it's only four minutes long.
53:56
It seems a lot longer than that. This was the video that we recorded in Germany at the location of Fritz Erba's imprisonment at the
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Wartburg Castle as a part of just a wonderful tour we did prior to the 500th anniversary of the
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Reformation. Four minutes long. And what it does is it illustrates what sacralism is.
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We're the church state. Now this was a Lutheran sacral state. Luther could have stepped in.
54:36
Luther probably could have had Fritz Erba freed. But he saw in Fritz Erba his greatest fear.
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Anarchy. He saw that if you let someone like Fritz Erba preach and live out in society, the result would be the breakdown of Christendom.
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But this Christendom was sacral and that's the problem.
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And so we had the opportunity, we had to divide the group in half.
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You could only get about 12 to 14 people into this little teeny tiny room. And so let me just play this for you.
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And please notice something else. Please notice who's standing right next to me. Immediately to my right.
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That was not intended to be relevant at this point, but immediately to my right, you will see someone standing next to me.
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So let's watch this together and then we can discuss why it's relevant.
55:46
What you're looking at is where Fritz Erba was imprisoned until the end of his life in 1548.
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What had happened is he had been arrested initially in the early 1530s. And what was he arrested for?
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Well, he was arrested for not baptizing his children and he refused to allow that to happen.
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Now I want you to remember the time frame here. When is the Bible being translated?
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Only a hundred meters away from us right here. 1521. And 1520, 1521.
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And so barely a decade later, you have a man being arrested for believing what he reads in the book that is translated here.
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Then as he's at the other place of his imprisonment, he's preaching. This causes people to begin supporting him.
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And so he is brought up here and he is put in this hole. And those of you that are here looking down, that is a very, very long way down there.
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I can't imagine how cold it was, how lonely it was. Certainly efforts were made to try to convince him to change his views, but he would not do so.
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And so here you have a man who finally loses his life, passes away, the cold, the deprivation that would have been his.
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And yet, you must understand, he is imprisoned by Protestant forces.
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This is sacralism. This is the state church. The very man who was fleeing from political persecution, hiding here, translating the
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Bible into German, here is a man who reads that Bible, believes what he reads, and ends up down there.
57:45
How do you put those two things together? Those two realities must be recognized historically, or we end up with a cartoon view of the
57:55
Reformation and a cartoonish view of the relationship of church and state and the warts, or the vortburg castle, but a different meaning, the warts that we see on the
58:08
Reformation, that we see on the work of the Reformation. It wasn't something that was just immediately perfect and wonderful.
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There were all sorts of difficulties along the way. I don't know about you, but I look down there, and if they were lowering me down there and saying, this is where you're going to be until you recant, how strongly do we believe what we believe, especially on an issue like baptism that so many people have so many different views on today?
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It is astounding to me, and it is convicting to me to think about how deeply people believed what they believed.
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Here is a man who believed the Word of God, or he would have cried to be released from this place. We know almost nothing about him.
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They think they found his skeleton buried outside the walls of this castle in 2006.
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Well, let's hope that they did, and can you imagine the reconciling power of Christ's work that someday we believe
59:12
Fritz Erbe will be in the presence not only of his Savior, but of many of the people who persecuted him.
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Talk about the healing of the body. That's what we see here, and it is a place that people walk by to go see the nice sights, hardly ever thinking about what something like this really tells us about the
59:39
Reformation and what took place. Yeah, so there you go.
59:51
I was looking for, in Christian History magazine, it used to be a magazine when
59:57
I was much younger called Christian History. I think it's actually still exists in some form, but I had it back when it was delivered by a postman every month in something called
01:00:07
The Mail. And I was looking for the episode on some of the
01:00:16
Baptist martyrs, and the name has escaped me.
01:00:22
Sometimes I struggle to remember Fritz Erbe's name for some reason. I don't know why. But there was an
01:00:30
English Baptist that was arrested in the
01:00:36
Netherlands, as I recall, in the late 16th century, so about 30, 40 years after Fritz Erbe's death.
01:00:46
And he was condemned to be burned by the
01:00:51
Protestant, Reformed Protestant authorities. But what they would do, what they started doing, because they found out how powerful a person's testimony could be, is what they would start doing is either they would, as a part of the torture, with a knife made red hot in the flame, literally cut out your tongue so you could not testify, you could not speak.
01:01:26
Or they developed tongue clips where they would force your tongue out of your mouth and they would put this clip on it and they'd screw it through the tongue.
01:01:37
And there is a family, the family of the man that was killed or of a fellow believer nearby, as I recall.
01:01:49
I'm not exactly sure. Anyway, when this martyr was burned, after the ashes cooled, this man saw in the ashes that tongue clip, and they have it in the family to this day, that had been used to silence this martyr before he died.
01:02:12
So there is a long Baptist martyrology. So Baptists tend to be you know, zwingly, drowned
01:02:21
Baptists off the bridge in Zurich. And we see Luther with Fritz Erba.
01:02:29
We see what happened after these things. There was a Baptist drowned or burned.
01:02:36
I have to look that one back up. In 1611, the same year as the King James Translation in London.
01:02:43
So there's a long Baptist martyrology that we would trace to a sacral concept where instead of having a free church that has a clear prophetic voice to the state, you have sacralism, you have a mixture, you have a breaking down the barriers.
01:03:09
And that temptation of power has proven to be disastrous.
01:03:15
In history. So no matter what, no matter what happens, no matter how this all works out, those things have to be kept in mind.
01:03:24
Though the men who killed those Baptists were Calvinists. They had the
01:03:32
Bible in their own language. They were well trained in its teachings.
01:03:39
And yet they martyred a brother in Christ. That can't be ignored.
01:03:45
That can't be forgotten and just put off to the side. And so that's why
01:03:51
I say there has to be this massive move of the spirit to where you have a creation of a functional
01:04:01
Catholicity, small c, a functional Catholicity. Because, and I'm sure that Doug and I are going to be discussing this fairly soon, whenever we do the next part of this dialogue.
01:04:12
But he has a book coming out called Mere Christendom and he argues for a apostles creed level
01:04:18
Catholicity. Well, okay, that's really interesting.
01:04:31
Okay. The problem is you don't have the gospel there. And that's what changes hearts.
01:04:37
That's without the gospel, you can have the inquisitor and the one being tortured, both agreeing to the apostles creed, but it's the gospel that changes the heart.
01:04:53
It's what that triune God has done in Christ and what it means for Christ to die on that cross.
01:04:59
Because they're both going to say, yes, Christ died, Barian was rose again. So what does that mean? There's where the real issue is.
01:05:06
That's where the rubber meets the road. So what
01:05:13
I would like everyone to be hearing is that blessed is the nation whose
01:05:24
God is Yahweh. Blessed is the nation whose God is Yahweh.
01:05:29
Do we want our nation blessed? Then we have to proclaim the one true
01:05:34
God and call men to understand what it means to follow him.
01:05:41
And sin is a rebuke upon any people. We have to be able to know what sin is.
01:05:48
The church's job is to clearly proclaim that, live it out and to clearly proclaim that, which includes refuting the wolves and the heretics that are telling people that transgenderism is
01:06:06
God's gift and gay mirage is God's gift and all the rest of that stuff. We've got a lot of work to do there.
01:06:14
No question about it. But that's our sphere. And our sphere is to tell the magistrates, you must stop murdering unborn children.
01:06:27
Now, if saying, and this is what happened when I was talking with Doug.
01:06:34
Look, if what you're saying is that if you clearly say to the civil magistrates, here is the parameters for God's cursing and God's blessing.
01:06:50
And if you're saying is, I want my nation to be blessed of God. If that's all
01:06:58
Christian nationalism means, okay. But that's not how it's being used.
01:07:05
Unfortunately, that's as far as I can go with it. But that's as far as I would think you would need to go with it.
01:07:15
Is that here is what it means. This is how you receive
01:07:20
God's blessings. This is how you receive God's cursing. You either bow the knee.
01:07:28
It's Christ or chaos. Bow the knee or receive God's judgment.
01:07:34
And if that leads to a Christian nation, that is a nation that cries out to God, we want your blessing, save us in and through the merits of Jesus Christ.
01:07:46
But the only way that's going to happen is if you change the majority of the people's hearts in that society.
01:07:56
And that requires the sovereign decree of God. And if your eschatology says that ain't ever going to happen, we're going down in flames, we're going to take on water until we slip below the waves, then you're going to go, that ain't ever going to happen.
01:08:15
And so it really, I don't know how you can say it any more gently this, why should you be trying to warn them?
01:08:23
Because that's all that can happen. Okay. But if your eschatology says,
01:08:31
God calls you to do this and it's not for nothing, it will eventually have the promised, the coastlands will come seeking his law.
01:08:41
They will flock to Zion. And the son in speaking, yeah,
01:08:48
Matt LePage just posted, did you see it? That's the exact picture I almost brought today.
01:08:54
I almost brought, yeah, it was Hans Brett. That's right. I almost brought that today.
01:09:01
Hold on a second here. Thanks, Matt. Why is it doing that?
01:09:10
It dragged a bunch of stuff over here. I didn't want to drag over here, but okay. And can
01:09:21
I get that any bigger? That's about as big as I can get it right now.
01:09:32
But there's, well, that's about as large as I can get right there.
01:09:40
There they are. Now, if I recall correctly, what I read this morning was cutting his tongue out.
01:09:46
But like I said, that's where there was some confusion.
01:09:52
There was a tongue clip that was used. I thought it was Hans Brett. But yeah, that was not a gentle time.
01:09:58
And again, this was Christians doing this to Christians. So whatever you do, whatever we're talking about when we talk about, quote unquote,
01:10:12
Christian nationalism, it can't be sacralism. Sacralism is a massive failure.
01:10:20
It was a massive failure. And it would be a massive failure again, because it wasn't dependent upon changed hearts.
01:10:26
It was dependent upon infant baptism. Hey, the tax rolls of the state where the baptism rolls the church.
01:10:41
They're sacralism. Okay. That can never be allowed to happen because this is the result.
01:10:50
Don't let them talk because they might cause more problems. So we need a lot of definitions.
01:11:01
So if you're going to disagree with your brothers, let's say they hold a different eschatology.
01:11:09
Try as best you can to hear where they're coming from and interpret their words in the best light of their eschatology.
01:11:22
Look at the best light. Now we normally do that. And especially in eschatology, we normally just don't do that. I don't know why.
01:11:30
I can do that because I've been Dispy Premil. I've been Amil. I did their
01:11:37
Archie Sproul thing, as far as that's concerned. And so I can listen and try to go, well,
01:11:43
I can sort of see how maybe, you know, if you've had this emphasis, that emphasis, you might feel, you know, try to do that.
01:11:51
Try to hear the definitions that the other side are using. But at the same time, try to hear the concerns that someone might have, especially if they have a traditional understanding of where you're coming from.
01:12:06
So I can't tell you how many times I've had people come up to me after a conversation somewhere. And wow,
01:12:12
I've gone late. Sorry. And I know I can tell by what they're saying.
01:12:19
They've been told that Calvinists believe this, and they have this negative, horrible perspective.
01:12:28
And if you know that's where they're coming from, you can, in your response, you can disarm them.
01:12:33
You can help them. You can try to help them get over their prejudice. And so posting memes of clown shoes or, look, there is a proper use of the term pietism.
01:12:53
There's a positive use of it. There's a negative use of it. There's a pietism that results in Christians running away from society and just creating their own little sects out in the wood type thing and leaving the world to go to hell in a handbasket.
01:13:10
If you're going to use those terms, assume the best.
01:13:19
What I saw over the past couple of days was just simply circling wagons and firing blindly.
01:13:27
And that doesn't help anybody. At all. Let people define their terms.
01:13:38
Push them to define their terms if they're actually not defining their terms. But recognize that dividing ourselves up right now in a situation where I don't see any evidence of some massive move of the
01:13:56
Spirit of God in the sense of broken people everywhere repenting of their perversities.
01:14:04
And I see judgment right now. There's no reason for us to be shooting each other, especially when we end up in the gulag next to each other, for a period of trying and difficulty.
01:14:22
I still believe that Christ is going to... But this may well be a situation where I've said over and over again, someday there's going to be a museum to this insanity.
01:14:35
And they're going to be playing these transgender videos in a museum where people will walk through and go, can you believe the insanity that infected the entire
01:14:47
Western world? Man, we can never let that happen again. Might be a ways down the road, but there you go.
01:14:58
There you go. So let's stop with the mockery memes and all that kind of err type stuff.
01:15:13
On any side, let's be accurate in what we have to say. Let's not go, well, your position will eventually end up...
01:15:25
It's so easy to do that. And anybody can do that to our position too. So let's try to have these conversations in an adult fashion that shows that we recognize the 99 .9
01:15:41
% that we agree on and are not willing to send somebody to the fires of Hades for the 0 .1
01:15:50
% that we don't agree on. All right. I am actually well over time because I've got places to go, things to do.