Live From Flagstaff: Defending Allie Stuckey’s Common Sense and More

Greetings and welcome to the Dividing Line, coming to you sort of live, the way things are done these days via the internet, from Flagstaff, Arizona, where it's not nearly as hot as it is in Phoenix, I think it's supposed to be like 109 or something like that, 111,

I forget what it was in Phoenix. But up here in the high country, in virus -plagued

Arizona, I heard today that if you want to go to New York, that you get a 14 -day quarantine if you go to New York.

I'm not interested in going to New York, but if I had been planning on going to New York, that would probably pretty much end my plans on going to New York.

So, yes, indeed, here we are, the summer of 2020, it is the longest year in history, very clearly, and we're barely halfway through it.

So yeah, 2020 is going to be turned into a verb, let's not go full 2020 on that.

I've seen some interesting memes that people are coming up with, and I have to agree with them there.

The only thing that worries me is what's 2021 going to be like?

I don't even want to think about that. But anyway, welcome to the program. What we're going to do today on the program,

I'm going to start off by putting up a tweet.

Let me see if I can do that for you without messing everything up. But here is a tweet that I think should be coming through to you clearly.

Hope so anyways. And you have a meme from Ali Beth Stuckey that says the following, in my experience, as the

Christian moves to the left politically, they begin to take the Bible less seriously. I've never seen someone become more liberal socially or politically while becoming more solid theologically.

Biblical inerrancy seems to give way to cultural relevance now. It's easier for me to address,

I'll come back to that in a moment, it's easier for me to address really denominational contexts, entire groups, individuals.

I mean, I suppose you could posit the idea of a specific individual who, for some reason, would become more solid in their understanding of what inspiration means.

The consistency of scripture. That's generally not what happens when someone is moving to the left culturally, philosophically, things like that.

And we can provide so many examples of this. And interestingly enough, one of the gentlemen who commented on that, which we'll look at in a moment,

Jamar Tisby, is an example of this. But just look at Matthew Vines, who begins with a certain set of arguments because he was raised in a particular context that had a higher view of scripture.

What's the track over time? For himself, look at any church that becomes quote -unquote affirming.

Look at any denomination. Look at seminaries. Oh, goodness. It would be so easy to look at my personal experience,

Fuller Theological Seminary. People have often asked, well, why did you go to Fuller?

Because I didn't have any other choices, to be very honest with you. There had been a few days when

I was very seriously looking at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary up in the

Mill Valley area, which no longer exists, sadly. But the impending arrival of our first child pretty much ended that.

I had to, if I was going to continue on in my education, having graduated from Grand Canyon College, if I wanted to do anything more in theology, there was at the time in And we were dirt poor, despite our white privilege.

We were dirt poor. And so there was only one option.

And the nice thing was, at the time, Fuller's Phoenix campus drew very heavily from Grand Canyon.

So, for example, that's why I was able to take seven years of Greek with the same professor. I took four years at Canyon, three years

Fuller with the same professor. I've often jokingly said that he had hair when

I started with him, and seven years later he did not. And that happens to be true. I don't know if, you know, correlation, causation, there's lots of discussions about things like that.

Anyway, but, and of course, in the providence of God, I have said many times to friends and co -workers in the ministry.

At the time, I did not understand why I was going to Fuller. I do fully understand why it worked out that way.

It has been one of the greatest advantages that I've had. When I debated Shabir Ali in 2006, my first truly

Muslim debate at Biola in California, the advantage that I had and that Shabir knew

I had that night was, I had taken from him the advantage he had in debating most apologists.

Most apologists are conservative, theologically speaking, and don't know a lot about liberalism.

And he had utilized our liberal scholars to his advantage in all the debates that I was doing.

It didn't work for me, because I went to Fuller. And, of course, I graduated in 89, started in 85.

Fuller was not nearly as far to the left as they are today. And isn't it interesting?

You can count on one hand, with fingers left over, the number of schools and seminaries that have a record of going from left to right.

The history of denominational seminaries and schools in the

United States goes one direction. It's almost like, you know, you've heard the stories about which direction things spin, whether you're in the northern hemisphere or the southern hemisphere.

When it comes to theological schools, institutions, Bible colleges, seminaries, and denominations, it is a long history of going left, left, left.

Finally, the believers in a denomination give up. Splitsville, and sadly,

I just don't know if we just aren't really good at this or what, the liberals keep all of the buildings and the money, and the conservatives go out and start all over again.

And it stands firm for a while, and then it starts going left, left, left, left, left, and then it just repeats itself over and over and over and over again.

This is how it has worked for quite some time now. And this is the case with nominations.

Certainly, some denominational and church splits don't have anything to do with the tendency and the direction of theology.

I've told the story that a friend of mine and I were driving out to the Andersonville prison from back in the

Civil War days. I'm sure they'll tear that thing down before long. Everything's going to get torn down a little later.

But we'd be driving through a town, and there'd be the First Baptist Church. And then you'd turn a corner, and there's the Second Baptist Church.

And you go over the hill, and there's the Third Baptist Church. I think the farthest we got once we got into the country was the Seventh Baptist Church. Now, the theological distinctions between those seven churches were very, very, very small.

Most of it was personal, personalities, color of the drapes, color of the carpet, whatever.

These are reasons why people split. And so Baptists have always been really, really good at splitting.

And that's why you have denominations, Baptist denominations, that are all over the spectrum from the

IFB super conservative over here to American Baptists over here that are not even really, at least now,

Trinitarians. So massive, wide split.

And almost any Presbyterian denomination you talk to, their history is, well, it used to be this, and then the liberals went this way, and then this way.

And then sometimes you'll end up two denominations that both have left liberals are now really small and struggling, and so let's get together.

And so you'll get alliance churches and stuff like that.

But the spin is almost always to the left. And history shows us that this is the reality.

And it is worthwhile thinking about why that is. I will just briefly suggest to you that I think the primary reason for seminaries and Bible colleges constantly moving to the left is because of an embarrassment on the part of the staff who want to be accepted at the world's table of scholarship.

And so the way that we do much of scholarship in the

West, especially at the graduate level, where you have to come up with a new idea, a new thesis for a dissertation, well, in the

Christian faith, something that's new is very often something that's heretical. It's not that there aren't deeper areas of study you can go into.

There's all sorts of grammatical issues and things like that in the New Testament that would be worth the deep dive.

But the point is that if you believe that you already possess a body of divine truth, it's going to be very likely that trying to come up with new spins on that is going to require you to be a little bit more open to heresy.

And that's really what has happened over the years. You look at Union Theological Seminary. Union's just an awesome example of this, because here you have,

I call it the walking dead seminary, because it's a corpse. It died really a very long time ago.

The TV series could literally last for 50 years if Union Theological Seminary is any indication of how long walkers can go.

A lot of us have sat around theorizing, if walkers look as bad as they do, won't they eventually just fall apart?

Not very scary. All it can do is a pair of teeth biting at you from the ground.

That's OK. That happens theologically, too. And that's what Union is.

But I can see the huge, huge leftward swing in Fuller just since I graduated in 89 and how it exists today.

I mean, I could never have survived at Fuller today, but I could in the 1980s.

That doesn't mean that I was comfortable. I had to have those conversations. I had to put my hand up in a

New Testament class and defend a belief in inerrancy after the professor had just gone through why you shouldn't believe in inerrancy.

But I didn't fail the class. In fact, I wasn't even damaged by—it was partly because the way

I did it. You do it respectfully. You do the work that you're asked to do. I wasn't trying to be some type of nasty fundie guy in their midst, even though I did call myself

Fuller's token fundamentalist. But I've seen the massive shift, and it's almost never arrested.

It's almost never stopped. So as much people today, as we've seen people—I had another leader of some

Christian band or something become an atheist recently. This really isn't anything overly unusual.

But it's interesting that very frequently when you first see that social media post about, well, you know,

I've just got to be honest with myself about the questions I have. It's going to be six months to two years before they're marching in gay pride events and calling all the authors of the

Bible white supremacists or something like that. I mean, it takes some time, but it's coming.

And we shouldn't be overly shocked and surprised when that kind of thing takes place.

Why, again, is all of this? Well, they went out from us, so it might be known that they were not truly of us.

It's been years ago now that I preached that sermon, the blessings of apostasy.

But the reality is the proclamation of the gospel brings to bear convicting truths that will eventually cause a rebel sinner to want to stop hearing those convicting truths.

And that can be accomplished in a number of different ways. People try to do that from within the church because they're very invested in the church.

And that's where you get leftist theology and things like that. Or they just break away and say, fine,

I'm not going to do that. A couple of days ago, there was this huge firestorm on Twitter where some

Joe Loyoman, I don't have it queued up. Sorry, but well, I might actually.

But I'm using the computer to do the live streaming. And so if I go looking for stuff,

I can imagine messing things up. But there was a Joe Loyoman, a female, a woman, at least that's my assumption these days.

It's just getting too old for this. But anyway, she put out this thread on Twitter about how she's a

Christian, but she doesn't believe in Jesus. She believes in the Christ spirit and she doesn't believe in evangelism.

And she thinks that LGBTQ, I lost track after the

I. I'm not sure what's supposed to come after that now. I'm a little bit slow to try to.

I mean, remember when it was just LGBT? I actually remember it was just LGB. I remember

LGB. I don't know if the rest of you remember. I remember LGB. I actually remember just G.

It wasn't all that long ago because the T has changed everything. And now it's

LGBTQI something. I don't know. I think it was a P. I've lost track.

The T thing is what messes everything up. But anyways, she's saying that LGBTQI individuals are divine and should be in leadership of all of us or something along these lines.

It's just like, oh, OK. And you read through the thread and here is a person saying, yes,

I'm a Christian and I don't believe in Jesus and I reject everything that the

Christian faith has ever stood for, defined, anything. And there's all these people just going, that's impossible.

What are you talking about? I read that kind of stuff and I just go, that's the natural end of the progression.

I mean, I really honestly think that most of the people at Union Seminary, if they would just be consistent themselves, that's where they will end up.

That's where they should end up anyways. This is what leftism is. And I was raised,

I've said this before, I was raised referring to this as liberalism. But I have purposely stopped adopting that language because liberality is the giving of freedoms.

Initially, it was used claiming freedom from certain dogmas. OK, but what we're seeing today isn't liberalism.

It is leftism. And the one thing that leftism does not have in its current incarnation is a liberal giving freedom to people other than what the left says.

So this whole issue of leftism, of the left, it's extremely attractive.

It promises freedom. And given the nature of Christian truth,

I think this is what's important. The very essence of the

Christian faith exists in opposition to our flesh.

Our flesh is always looking for ways to get out from underneath the all -searching eye of God.

And if we really understand what God has done in Christ, then the all -searching eye of God is not something we fear.

If we understand that we are called to come to the throne of grace, and that the way has been opened to the throne of grace by the finished work of Christ, if this is a part of our daily reality, then a lot of the impetus for leftism in theology is banished just simply by that recognition.

Very, very important to see that. But that's not what a lot of people have. I don't know how many times

I've said it. But what you win them with is what you win them to.

When you win people to the faith through a message that is centered upon them and their happiness and self -satisfaction, rather than take up your cross, deny yourself, follow me on the death march, you end up with a lot of people who will redefine what the

Christian faith is about. And they'll start small. They're not

Joe Loyoman or whatever her name was, where you just basically deny everything and say, but I'm still a

Christian. And everyone wants to sit back and go, why bother? What are you gaining by even pretending this stuff?

But it's a continuum. And people are at different points along it. And some people stop at some point along the continuum, not because they have any particular reason to, but because that's where they feel comfortable.

Maybe that's where their friendships allow them to be, whatever.

But there isn't really a place that causes you to stop and will give you a solid foundation.

And so people end up, over time, moving far, far, far from where they were.

And then, of course, you get the people who do that rather quickly. And then where they once were is now the world's worst thing.

And now they become zealous in their crusade against their former faith. And you've seen the atheists and people like that.

If you didn't see the last, so far, the first and last debate that Jeff Durbin and I did together, we're going to fix that someday,

I hope. I mean, who knew we did that debate in Salt Lake City, what the next year was going to bring?

But there you have an example of someone who was raised religious and then, maybe a really brilliant guy, but boy, you saw what happened in that type of situation.

So anyway, going back to Ali Bestaki's statement here, let's remind ourselves, having spent all that time on it.

So she said, in my experience, as a Christian moves to the left politically, they begin to take the Bible less seriously.

Now, I might just stop and say, maybe the reason for their move to the left politically is because of the underlying move to the left in their understanding of Scripture already, and in a

Christian worldview. I've never seen someone become more liberal socially, politically, while becoming more solid theologically, biblical inerrancy seems to give way to cultural relevance.

Now, immediately, we emphasize the reality that biblical inerrancy is a small minority view.

I think it's absolutely fundamental. I think it's vitally important.

I've lectured on this for a long, long time. I know all the reasons that people use to reject it.

N .T. Wright calls it that stupid American doctrine. I get it.

I understand. But it is a minority view, and that tells you much more, not in church history, but in the current context.

That's where you have a difference between church history as an overview and the current context in our current situation.

I really want, especially my audience, to know where you really are, because I've seen a lot of people stumble when they discovered that what had been a given in the entirety of their

Christian life wasn't a given outside of the narrow range of their religious experience.

I've seen people really bothered when they came to understand that, and part of it was because they thought we were saying the opposite of that.

They interpreted the teaching and preaching of their church as communicating to them that all

Christians believe as we believe on these issues. Sometimes, especially in the fundamentalist context, that's exactly what is being said.

If you disagree with us on this entire spectrum of issues, then you're just clearly not a

Christian. Some people are saying that. I try, but we don't do a generally really good job in defining the parameters of the faith, in defining where to draw the lines.

We struggle a little bit with that. Everything's going to shake here for a second, but hold on.

Now, this is not going to work if I try to type on it, but what I just did is

I just propped up the back of the computer, because you know how you start hearing the fans kicking on, and they're up to 4 ,600

RPM, and since we're using the internal microphone, I was sitting there going,

I think maybe a little airflow might help a little bit to keep it from getting too much worse, or it may have no impact at all.

Who knows? We'll see. Why did

I specifically... Oh, hi, Rich. Graphic is still up. Yes, I know it is. I'm going back to it.

I should probably take WhatsApp down on here so you can use that without it making that terrible noise.

Okay, so you can use it again, and it won't make any noise this time. What I want to do is...

Okay, so there's what Ali Bestaki said. I saw a few people responding to her, but this was the response

I specifically wanted to focus on, and it's from Jamar Tisby, and Jamar Tisby says, this statement comes from a version of Christianity hermetically sealed, one might say, segregated from the rest of the

Christian body. The entire black church tradition refutes her myopic assessment, and the sentiment is dismissive of countless

Christians and their faith. So I wanted you to see that so that you can see exactly what

Jamar Tisby had to say. Now, why should we worry about what Jamar Tisby has to say? Well, for those of you who don't remember,

Jamar Tisby was... I'm not sure whether he was the founder of or one of the primary movers of RON, Reformed African American Network.

And we first made reference to RON probably off the top of my head, 2017 maybe.

I'm thinking that's when the issue with the young black man was flipping off the cops, and as he walked in front of my car in traffic, and I wrote a 500 some odd word, basically a paragraph on Facebook, and oh, the place blew up, because I mentioned fatherlessness, and I mentioned rejection of authority, and things like that, and everybody just had a cow.

And that was, I think, 2017, if I recall correctly.

It was about a year before the MLK 50 stuff. And then the

Reformed African American Network transitioned into The Witness.

And if anyone has been following, and I was sort of wondering, is this why

Jamar responded? Sorry about that. Is this why

Jamar responded to Ali Bestaki? Because he sees himself in her words.

Because he's got to know that where he is today is where he was 10 years ago, or five years ago, or even three years ago.

And if you recognize that, then you have to ask yourself the question, well, what has changed and why?

I'm not one of those people that says, well, if you're not exactly where you were 30 years ago, then you're just a terrible, horrible compromiser, et cetera, et cetera.

No, there is room and necessity of growth for all of us, and the real issue is what about the foundations?

What about the very core of the faith? And the problem is the left -right split is normally focused upon core issues, upon the issue of inerrancy, upon the issue of inspiration, upon what external sources you're going to allow to have a tremendous impact in how you think about the faith.

And look, there are conservatives who have the influence of external sources and don't know it.

I've talked about it before in regards to fundamentalism. Fundamentalists will say, remember what

Dave Hunt said to me? James, I have no traditions. That was one of the clearest examples that you could ever have of someone who has a tremendous amount of traditions but has no way of examining those traditions, no way of critically analyzing those traditions because of this overarching presupposition that I don't have traditions.

I only believe what's in the Bible. Well, that's a noble sentiment, but if you don't actually practice it through meaningful methodologies of exegesis, it's a great way to smuggle in your traditions and always do it on the basis of alleged scripture.

So the person on the right wants to affirm

Sola Scriptura and the sufficiency of scripture and Tota Scriptura, the entirety of scripture. The person on the left knows.

When you first start down that road, you may not want to admit this.

You may want to try to stay away from it. But eventually, you wake up one morning and you go,

I'm really seeing the Bible very differently than I used to.

And you have to ask yourself the question, why, where is this going to lead? And so I think that was behind maybe

Jamar hearing an echo of something about himself. So when it says this statement comes from a version of Christianity hermetically sealed,

I might say segregated from the rest of the Christian body. Well, so you have someone congratulating himself about how broad he is and what, you know, this is great.

And remember the emergent church stuff? A lot of people don't necessarily remember the emergent church stuff.

It was a big splash for a while. For just about as long as, what was that prayer?

Prayer of Jadus. Did you ever pray the prayer of Jadus? No, we got to you before that?

Good, good, I'm glad. Yeah, the emergent church lasted about as long as the prayer of Jadus did.

But man, there was an entire publishing company that grew out of the prayer of Jadus. They made that much money off it.

I'm not sure if they still have survived. Anyway, the emergent church was a bunch of fundamentalists who came to realize that a bunch of the things they believed as fundamentalists really weren't representative of what the apostles taught.

But what they did is they then threw out all of church history. Threw out, as in throw out, not threw out the other through.

We need to come up with a different word there. Anyway, the English vocabulary just throws a real curve there.

Checked out, yeah, okay. They got rid of church history and basically said, all right, let's just put it all on the table.

Let's reevaluate everything from the Trinity on up. So it was the proverbial baby with the bathwater type thing.

And I get the mindset coming to realize that you need to be free to examine what you've been taught.

Okay, there always has to be a balance. No question about it. But what happens with people on the road to the left is they see themselves heading that way.

But they don't want to be honest themselves as to exactly what the driving motivating factors are.

Because if they're really honest themselves, they know my big thing is this social issue.

And I am starting to change my perspectives so that I can be more focused upon this one social issue.

This is the thing. That's why I believe one of the greatest signs of Christian maturity is that you realize that balance is the great key to obtaining

Christian maturity. That you're not looking for the one huge lightning bolt from heaven that's all of a sudden going to enlighten you about it.

Not it'll light you up, enlighten you and give you all that maturity and things like that.

But you realize that the great challenge you're going to have throughout your

Christian life even into your older years is to remain balanced.

And balance requires an understanding of what is absolutely foundational and definitional to the faith.

And what is important and then the concentric spheres going out from there.

And where you can draw that line as to what's absolutely necessary.

And then the space between that and where someone enters into a damnable heresy which you can't always draw as nice and neatly as you would like.

And just because one of your great heroes the faith drew it at some point doesn't mean you necessarily have to do the same thing.

For example, I don't recommend whatsoever the shooting of Unitarians or the burning of Unitarians.

But I can still learn from people who in their context thought that was the necessary way to go.

Now, by the way, what I just said is the very attitude toward history which is currently under full -scale assault in our society.

In our society today if anyone in history was not a 21st century woke leftist then they aren't worthy of even being remembered and every monument to their existence needs to be wiped away.

And if you're willing to destroy the monuments that have stood there for hundreds of years then obviously you're going to be very willing to engage in the editing of the written text of history as well.

We should be very, very well aware of this and protect our history.

Talk a little bit more about that maybe a little bit later. Anyway, so there is a balance that needs to be had.

We want to stand firm on the foundations of what scripture teaches without taking that to the point where my personal interpretation of all these things becomes absolutely mandatory for everybody else and everybody else has to agree with me on everything.

And everybody falls somewhere in that spectrum. And so what I'm saying is maturity is requiring you to think through why am

I here and not over there and not over there? Could I go to that church over there?

If I couldn't, why? But if a friend of mine goes over there can we have Christian fellowship?

Even though I couldn't be a part of that church. See, these are things that we should be thinking through but very often we don't.

And so there's, Jamar Tisbee is a smart guy and so he uses language in a very specific way.

So when he says that this comes from a version of Christianity hermetically sealed, one might say segregated from the rest of the

Christian body. Well, that sounds really wise.

And it touches on a note that we can recognize as being important.

And that is we know people who are in a hermetically sealed segregated form of Christianity.

Now she's not and saying what she said is not that but in so much as certain fundamentalists could say what she said then you can make that kind of a statement.

Obviously, she actually has a much wider exposure to beliefs and perspectives.

So she knows that she's representing a purposefully conservative aspect of things and is trying to make a specific point.

But once again, hidden in the statement from Jamar Tisbee is sort of the presuppositional push that says the

Christian body includes almost an unlimited variety of expressions.

And I'd be really interested in seeing how

Jamar Tisbee's interpretation of what the Christian body is has changed over the last 10 years or maybe only the last six years.

I think culturally, Ferguson was a turning point. It was a turning point for a lot of people.

I think it was a turning point for Thabiti Aniwili. I think it was a turning point for Jamar Tisbee.

I think it was a turning point for Anthony Bradley. And maybe faster or slower depending on the individual.

But I think that's where a lot of this began. And so I would love to be able to compare the

Jamar Tisbee of 2010 with the Jamar Tisbee of 2020 and ask questions of each that would shine a light on just what has changed and why has it changed.

But then the care of the first sentence gives way to the lack of care of the next sentence.

The entire black church tradition refutes her myopic assessment and the sentiment is dismissive of countless

Christians and their faith. Now I don't see how those two clauses are actually overly logically related to one another.

There's two different assertions being made there and one of them is really strange.

The entire black church tradition refutes her myopic assessment. So the entire black church tradition.

I'm trying to hear what Jamar Tisbee was saying. Maybe what he's saying is that the entire tradition has moved to the left.

Because we know that the Republicans and the

Democrats go all the way back to the time of the Civil War. And we know the Democrats were in the south and the

Republicans were in the north. And we know who freed the slaves and it wasn't the Democrats. We know who started the

KKK and it wasn't the Republicans. And we know who voted for the Civil Rights Act and it wasn't

Democrats. So we know the history and yet the black tradition quote unquote is in the left.

It is much more to the left than it is to the right. But I would immediately be offended if I was any one of a number of black friends that I have and this is why my black friends who would oppose what

Jamar Tisbee says can simply expect to in essence be excommunicated from the black community or what we would call the black church tradition.

Because there is a very strong desire to have a monolithic group.

A monolithic representation. And so my experience is when

Voti or Sandal or I could name a number of other guys write something and say something.

You know the Just Thinking podcast that goes against the flow of the leftward narrative in the black church.

The terms that are used of them are terms that fundamentally deny their reality as a black person.

So who was it? Eric Mason. Eric Mason is either the

T4G thing or the MLK thing. I forget. It was two years ago now. They were really close together. In his comments talked about black men who are black on the outside and Anglo on the inside.

Now there's a term that is used for that. He didn't use that thankfully in his talk.

But it is used very, very regularly in public discourse and social media.

And I see it used all the time in a very racially insensitive fashion.

But one of the big problems I have is that when you teach an entire group of people that they are not capable of committing a particular sin, that's the best way to make sure that sin is going to be committed.

And if you tell an entire people you cannot be racists, that helps to foster racist attitudes.

If racism is a sin, then all of Adam's children are subject to that sin.

If you say that it's only a power structure thing and all the rest of that stuff, you've completely lost the biblical categories.

You're out in the woods someplace, which is where we are right now, to be honest with you, for everybody.

But it's not the entire black church. It's not a refutation of her assessment.

In fact, if anything, Jamar Tisby is sort of the living example of exactly what she was saying. And then to say the sentiment is dismissive of countless

Christians and their faith, well, again, it's not.

Her statement wasn't about defining their

Christianity. Her statement was an observation of the allowance of external sources to come in and create lenses through which you then read scripture.

And you end up changing the message of scripture in the process. This is what leftism has done and is doing in our day.

And so I wanted to comment on that, not only in defense of what

Allie Stuckey had said, but then to unpack that so that we have an understanding and idea of why someone who once had the ability to argue that he was a conservative, reformed ministerial student, why he would be where he is now.

What are the parameters? What's going on there? That will help us to understand a lot of things that are happening in our land right now.

Now, I'm not sure what's going to be happening allegedly tomorrow.

No, allegedly today. I guess this didn't happen. It's Thursday, right? Okay. There was a threat to destroy a monument of Lincoln.

And evidently, the reason, I have a massive studio audience of one here.

But every once in a while you might hear some chuckling going on. The alleged reason for the destruction of the

Lincoln Emancipation Memorial is because there is a Black person represented in it at his feet.

Well, of course, at the time it was made, what that represented was the thanks of the

Black people for what Lincoln did. But what it meant historically and how things are expressed in art doesn't matter to the barbarians who are running out of our universities, having been made barbarians in our universities, to light fire to everything in society to burn and destroy it.

That's why they're called barbarians. It's not that they don't know the history of Lincoln. They probably don't, but they wouldn't care.

It's the optics and it's the idea that we are correct in our modern day to bring anyone to the bar of history based upon our current preferred standards.

Not the standards in which they live, not the knowledge in which they had, not the cultural situation which they existed.

None of that is relevant. It does not matter. The barbarians that we are facing today, emotionally, on a decision level, on the offense level of what will offend them, are children.

They're children. They are... I'm just going to say it straight up.

I can drive down a road in any major American city and see things that are offensive to me.

I can see people that are offensive to me. I can see signs that are offensive to me. I can see behaviors that are offensive to me. And I do not stop my vehicle every 500 meters to jump out and spray paint something or attach a tow line to my

Subaru and pull the thing over and drag it down the street, or anything like that at all.

I generally, when I get in my vehicle, I drive to where I want to go. And my blood pressure really doesn't rise because of the things that could offend me on the way.

This is called being an adult. This is called controlling your emotion.

This is called having your mind functioning in such a fashion that you can see something that's offensive, but there's no reason to be offended by it.

You make note of it. You might speak to it in broad, general categories when you have such opportunities to do so, but you don't have to get upset about it.

That is the old style of thinking. And unfortunately, the new style of thinking is mirrored by our elected officials, who likewise went through a schooling system that taught them not how to become mature, but how to become offended.

And that offense is an important, positive thing. And that their offense is what everyone else has to be concerned about.

If somebody else is offended by something that they're not offended by, it doesn't matter. But we are literally experiencing a period of time in the

United States, and unfortunately, we export this, and so it's happening in other nations as well, where we take people from the past, we take them out of their context, we sit them down today, and we judge them by an arbitrary standard that we have created today.

And therefore, if they don't pass the sniff test, if they remain offensive to us, then we try to wipe them out of our collective memory.

So it started in universities. It started in the history departments.

You don't teach history. You do not teach the methodology of doing history.

You don't teach people the mechanism whereby they can learn the most from history, can appreciate in the deepest sense.

Well, I've talked about this before. I can look back at history. I can look back at the

Civil War. I can look back at the Revolutionary War. I can look back at World War I, World War II, and I can read about people on both sides of those battles and those lines, and I can see things that I can learn from and appreciate and honor in people on both sides of those wars.

Yes, all of them. Revolutionary War. There were honorable

British soldiers and leaders involved in the

Revolutionary War. There were dishonorable American colonists.

If you can't look at them, their individual situation, to see they were, you're not doing history.

Nobody's doing history anymore. I consider it a recognition of honoring those who came before me in such a way that I want to be judged myself by those who come after me to be fair and mature and controlled in my analysis of people of the past.

That is no longer allowed. That has been banished from the universities for enough years now that the graduates of those universities are now governors and mayors telling the police to stand down and let the barbarians destroy memory.

If you allow that to continue, they will not stop. Once all of the statues are down, it's time to go after all the books, which they've already been doing quietly behind the scenes, but the computer has made it a little bit tough.

There's a lot of capacity out there to store history, but they're going to make the effort.

They're going to make the effort. What we're seeing are people seeking to destroy history.

I was looking for the passage, didn't find it, but there is a passage in scripture that tells us not to remove the ancient landmarks.

It's talking about the fact that you would put up these, either the stone memorials to where God had intervened for his people, so you can see

Jacob doing that and things like that. It was something to remind you every time you saw it, remember when God did this for you.

That's not a bad thing to do. Then there are also the land markers, which mark where your land was and your neighbor's land.

The idea of moving that is cheating your neighbor, but it's also recognizing.

Oh, it is in Proverbs. Yeah, there it is. Thank you very much. Proverbs 22, verse 28.

Do not move an ancient boundary stone set up by your ancestors. That's the NIV.

I better find a more conservative translation here. Okay. Do not move the ancient landmark that your fathers have set.

ESV. How's that? Okay. New Living Translation. You want the paraphrase?

Don't cheat your neighbor by moving the ancient boundary markers set up by previous generations, which is when

I explained it, that's exactly what it's saying. Because if you move that, you're taking, you're cheating. You're taking some of his land and making it your own.

The idea is let's not become the modernists.

Modernists think that we are the, a modernist does not see that he stands upon the shoulders of giants, does not see how dependent he is upon others, does not recognize that if it had been up to him, he would never have been thought of something like a cell phone or anything like that.

We are the beneficiaries of the brilliance of others who've come long before us.

But the modernist doesn't care about that. The modernist just believes that we are the final collected wisdom of mankind.

Most modernists don't read books. Most of them have no earthly idea what actually happened in the past.

Most of them don't read original sources. Most of them are monolingual. But what we're seeing are, is the result of fostering not only an ignorance of history, but this modern hubris together with unbridled emotion, no discipline of the mind, not seeing that as something that is positive and absolutely necessary.

And eventually you get to a tipping point where you have enough. It's not a majority. You don't, you do not need a majority to change a nation.

No rebellion has ever required a majority. There was a minority of the colonists that fought in the revolutionary war.

There were, most didn't want anything to do with it, but there were enough that they won really close, but there was enough.

It doesn't need to be the majority. It needs to be enough people who are controllable through their emotion, willing to destroy history, willing to destroy the institutions that give consistency to a nation.

That's all you need. And it looks to me like they're, it looks to me like they're being successful.

Will a pushback come? Well, I don't know. I'm trying to be thoughtful.

Isn't the easiest way of handling this because well, you've, you've watched some of these people, you start trying to reason with them.

They just start screaming, not screaming anything sensible, just screaming as if this is how you shut everything down.

It is. But how was that person fundamentally any different than a baboon or a chimpanzee who does the same thing?

That also ends conversation when they start screaming, that's all they can do because they're not humans.

And we literally abandoned our humanity when we behave in that fashion. Well, anyways,

I said I would only go an hour and I've gone an hour. So I appreciate rich putting this together.

And I hope some of these thoughts have been useful to you in the midst of all that's going on. I'll be back in the

Phoenix area next week. So we should have a regular schedule. Thanks for listening to the program today.