Erastian Church Compromise in the EFCA | Ep 20

And at that meeting, I shared some of these principles and I asked the question of them, is a free church still a free church if it's connected with some government program like PPP, that's the payment protection program by which churches could have money loaned to them by the civil government during COVID to pay their employees.

And that loan could turn into a grant forgiven by the federal government if the church did certain things, i .e. there's a string attached between the civil government and the church telling the church what to do.

And welcome to Tearing Down High Places. My name is Average Joe and I'm here to you with a lot of guests today. As you see, we've got a big quadrant going on here. Pastor Jeff Kluwer, as always, say hi, sir.

Hello. And then we've also got two special guests who I wanna do a quick introduction to. So we've got Pastor Seth Brickley coming to you from Eureka Baptist in St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. He is also the host, he was the host of TruthScript Be Not Conformed Conference where Pastor Jeff was speaking recently.

And as many of you know, Pastor Jeff has a story about some controversy that some things he said and being accused of a Christian as a Christian nationalist. And we have another pastor here, Pastor David Whitney, welcome.

He is from Cornerstone Free Church in Bowie, Maryland. And today's podcast is mostly gonna be Pastor Seth interviewing Pastor David. Pastor Jeff and I are gonna bow out in a couple of minutes here from the screen, but don't worry, we're here if you need us.

Just text in if we're doing this, if you're on the channels or send an email to podcast at cornerstonesj .org and we're always gonna answer your questions. Pastor Jeff, do you wanna say any words before we let Pastor Seth do the interview?

Yeah, I just wanna say, these are two of the most encouraging brothers in the Lord that I know. Both of them have been just a huge encouragement to me to fight the good fight, they are fellow soldiers.

These are guys that are unafraid, they are not conformed to the world, they're willing to take a stand even if it means they're gonna take heat. And both of them have taken heat from people that don't like their stand, but they're willing to tell the truth even at a cost.

So these are fellow soldiers here today, brothers.

Fantastic, Pastor Seth, you have the mic as they say.

All right, well, thanks Average Joe. And yeah, as we started here, I just wanna say, many of you who are listening and may be familiar with Pastor Jeff Cleaver's story. He wrote the book, Woke Free Church.

And in this book, he's detailing the woke drift of the leadership of the free church. And it's a very factual book. If you haven't read it, it's an excellent read. And because of him writing that book, he was disciplined, his ordination was disciplined first by the Board of Ministerial Standing of the Evangelical Free Church.

And then he appealed that, went to California where he appealed it to the congregations and they voted against him as well. 93 against him. And you might be wondering why did so many people vote against him?

They weren't really given accurate information. And largely speaking, the people who were there were supportive of the leadership. So that's kind of the story that some of you, maybe many of you are familiar with.

The story that you're less familiar with is the story of Pastor David Whitney. And as we start, Pastor David, how many years have you been a pastor in the Evangelical Free Church of America?

Well, thank you, Seth. And by the way, I love the title, Tearing Down the High Places. That's a wonderful podcast title. I've been involved about 43 years back after I graduated from high school as a group of people forming a church in New Jersey.

And they asked me to kind of serve as an interim pastor for them. And during that time, I strongly encouraged them. And they were planning to be independent, non-denominational sort of thing. I strongly encouraged them to become a free church, which they did.

And after I left and went to seminary, they moved across the river from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. Subsequently, that has changed its name from it was originally Bible Fellowship Evangelical Free Church, now it's a Riverstone and large church there in Yardley, Pennsylvania.

So first there, and then after graduating from seminary, a church in Florida, Trinity Evangelical Free Church in Eustis, Florida hired me on staff. I was with that church for a number of years, then moved up to Maryland.

And when we planted our church, Cornerstone, 31 years ago next month, we planted an Evangelical Free Church, again, at my encouragement to the steering committee as they were planning to do this. So we have been an Evangelical Free Church for 30 plus years.

And just last month voted to disaffiliate from them because of the way our congregation and myself as a pastor have been treated by the leadership of the Evangelical Free Church, sadly. And I love the Evangelical Free Church, been part of it for 42 years, and it's very painful to depart from it, but it became necessary as I'd like to share.

Yeah, and I just wanna say too, along with David and Pastor Jeff Kluwer, I share the same concerns that they share. And I too have a long history in the free church. I was born, raised, dedicated, baptized, even was an associate pastor in the free church.

I was licensed in the free church, I think about eight or nine years ago. About seven years ago, I started at Eureka Baptist Church. So now I'm a Baptist, but I still very much care about the movement.

Average Joe mentioned that a month ago, we hosted a conference. Pastor Jeff Kluwer spoke at that conference and told his story. And it was kind of a neat moment. He got to meet my parents and my parents had been in the free church up until recently their entire life.

And my great-grandparents and my grandparents were in the movement. My great-grandparents were in fact at Medicine Lake in Plymouth, Minnesota in 1950, during the merger when the Swedish church and the Norwegian church merged together.

So we're obviously very saddened by the present state of the evangelical free church where the leadership has taken the movement. It does not line up with the history of the movement. And most importantly, it's the woke movement, the woke drift is inconsistent with biblical truth.

And that's our greatest concern, of course. But we do care about the founders, right? And we want... So I appreciate guys like Jeff and David. And I know my family does as well and they were able to meet Jeff.

So that was really a special moment. Okay, so now that I got that out of the way, we're gonna have David tell his story from the very beginning. And this started way back in COVID. So would you take us to how this all started?

Thank you, Seth. And let me just preface this by saying that I have forgiven those who have wronged our congregation and myself. They're forgiven. I pray for their repentance that they would not remain in the state that they're in.

And so some would wonder, well, why share your story then? Well, I wanna share the story because I believe there is a theological heresy afoot in the American church. And that heresy is called Erastianism.

When I mentioned that to the board of ministerial standing, none of them have heard of that. So let me explain it. Thomas Erastus was a pure... Actually, he was one of the Calvinists that was part of the Westminster Confession as they were forming and debating issues.

He was asserting that the civil government should punish sins that are committed by members of the church. So somebody gossips, well, it's the job of the civil government. That's what his argument was.

And that was ultimately rejected by the Westminster Confession because they understood properly that when Jesus said, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God, the things that are God's, there's a separation of jurisdiction between the church and the state.

If I could just use two Christmas ornaments to say, okay, these are two separate jurisdictions. Well, Erastianism says that the civil government is over the church. The civil government is in charge of the church.

And so, therefore, if the church is told as it was in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, you cannot have home Bible studies. You cannot meet on the street and evangelize in an outdoor evangelist.

You cannot do, you cannot do. And the founders of the free church movement looked at that and said, wait a minute, where in the scripture do we find that the civil government is somehow over the church and it tells the church what to do and whatnot?

And they said, no, that's wrong. We find the apostles saying to the civil government, we ought to obey God rather than men, the very opposite of that. So they recognize that the Lutheran church system, state church in the Scandinavian countries was unbiblical.

So they separated from the Lutheran state church and they formed the free churches. And when they came here to the United States, because they spoke the same language, we would assume they would have joined in the congregations that were Swedish speaking or Norwegian or what have you.

No, they recognize those evangelical Lutheran churches in America do not recognize this problem of Erastianism. Even though obviously in America, we've had no Erastian set up. The first amendment guarantees that that's impossible at the federal level.

So they would have joined, but they recognize those churches are wrong about this issue of the relationship of the church and the state and therefore they form free churches separate from the evangelical Lutheran church in America, evangelical free church in America.

The free meaning, free from government control, free from the heresy of Erastianism, even though obviously most people today don't know what that's about. Well, you might say, that's an interesting theological problem that doesn't exist today.

We have the first amendment, obviously the civil government doesn't control the church. Oh, that was until 2020, when all churches were told in all 50 States, you have to shut your doors. And we did not do so.

Cornerstone remained open in the entirety, in spite of the fact that on the Friday before the closure of churches was taking place, we were told by the church that we had been renting for 25 years, that we could no longer use a facility at Sunday mornings.

And so we scrambled and found another place. We did not miss one Sunday of having public worship during all of 2020. Now at the close, like in November, there's pastors gathering, they call them clusters.

And of course we couldn't meet in person, can't do that during COVID. So we met by Zoom and they went around the circle asking each of the pastors, how's your church doing? How are you doing? How have you handled COVID and the shutdown and all this stuff?

And when it came to me, I simply said two things. Our church did not shut our doors at all. We met continuously. And secondly, the reason why we didn't is first of all, Hebrews 10, 24 and 25, do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together.

And secondly, the governor of the state of Maryland has no authority vis-a-vis the constitution of the state of Maryland to shut down any church whatsoever. In fact, our constitution probably has the strongest freedom of religion statement in the entire 50 states.

It states in Declaration of Rights, Article 36, that as it is the duty of every man to worship God, that's in our constitution. That's pretty shocking that that is still, they've tried to get rid of it repeatedly, but they haven't been able to.

It's duty. So if it's our duty to worship God, how can the governor prevent us from worshiping God? And it goes on, of course, to detail the religious liberty aspects of that in the manner that you, the worshiper, thinks that God demands of you to worship Him.

Stated that, and that obviously upsets some of the pastors because the entire circle of pastors had all closed their churches as you listen to their stories. You know, I'm not judging what they decided to do.

They're gonna have to answer to God for what they did, but for our church, we would not and did not close. And I believe we were blessed by God for doing that. So three pastors are very upset with me and they began an investigation based on the fact that we hadn't closed the doors of our church.

And their investigation was to listen to my sermons, which are all online and been online for 10 years or more. So you can go back in archives and listen to all of them, but they began to investigate sermons I preached during 2020 and became, as using their words, horrified, horrified.

So they demanded a meeting with me be met in February of 2021, Pastor Guy Nebone and Bill Kynes, Pastor Bill Kynes and Pastor Bill Rydell. And I asked in advance of the meeting for a list of the questions that they were going to ask me.

They gave me no such list, which I think is a violation of the biblical standards of justice. But they proceeded to go through my teaching, object to many things that I teach. For example, I teach that every parent ought to pull their children out of the public indoctrination system.

That system is doing damage to their children. They have a responsibility before God, Deuteronomy 6, to educate their children and not to put them into an indoctrination system. So that could be done by homeschooling or Christians in many ways.

But I always encourage, and they were offended that I did that and offended by a whole list of things, talking about the jabs that I advise people against and on and on it went. But ultimately they said nothing that I was preaching was in violation of the doctrinal statement of the evangelical free church.

I was not preaching heresy, but they were offended by the other things I was saying from the pulpit. And they said, David, you are not of the ethos of the evangelical free church. I wonder to myself, what's the ethos of the evangelical?

Where's that print? Is there a list of... No, it's something that apparently some people have come up with an idea. This is what it's about.

Could you share what these three pastors who you met with, what is their view on politics?

Again, that was one of their objections. They're saying, David, you're delving into politics from the pulpit. I said, no, if I say abortion is a sin, it's a crime, you're taking an innocent human life, that's not politics.

The left has made that political. It's really a biblical moral issue. If I say that the schools ought to be shut down and parents ought to make other choices for their age, they would say that's political.

Or if I say that promoting sodomy to little children in kindergarten is a wrong that ought not to be done, they might say that's political. Their approach was, these are political issues that you're dragging into the pulpit.

My argument is, no, no, no. These are moral issues that the word of God speaks and we're to preach the whole counsel of God, everything God says about every subject matter. And when it falls on the subject matter of what's happening in the culture, we ought to speak to it.

We shouldn't hide it under a bushel and pretend it doesn't exist. The interesting thing is Pastor Guy Nebone said to me, because ultimately their argument was, David, you're a Christian nationalist. And that was based on, as Guy Nebone said, that the three of them, Guy, Bill, Bill, had been spending extensive time studying critical race theory.

They gained a lot of understanding and insight and so forth and so on from critical race theories.

Really?

So not critiquing it.

Yeah, no. Accepting it and using it as a measuring stick by which to measure me. And I'm, you know, of not the ethos of the evangelical free church, I guess, they didn't spell this out, but I'm guessing because I don't adopt critical race theory.

I preach what I believe the Bible is saying about these issues that they would be calling political.

Bill Rydell is the chair of the national board of the free church.

Currently.

He wasn't at that time, but he is now, right?

Correct?

Right.

So he gave a message at an East district event where he talked about politics, right? What did he say in that message slash presentation?

He was saying that there should be, you know, Democrats and Republicans in the pew next to each other. They get along fine. And it kind of what happens from the pulpit doesn't upset, doesn't touch on the issues that would be hot button issues, you know, for one or the other.

And that his desire would be, he's right off of Capitol Hill where his church is. His desire would be that he'd have staffers from Senate and house of representatives from both parties in his church without any conflict or disagreement.

And it's like, hmm, that's interesting. I'd love to reach democratic staffers and help persuade them that the word of God says from the moment of conception, a human being is a human being created by God and is deserving of all God given rights that the rest of us have.

So that you don't discriminate against the unborn simply because of their size, their location of environment or their decree of dependency. They're made in the image of God and to take their life, an innocent human life is a crime, a crime that should be.

And so, but he was like, no, we can't do that. And in fact, in that same presentation, he made the point that he believed that sometimes a woman and I'm paraphrasing him here. I'm not quoting him exactly.

Sometimes a woman needs the option of abortion. Therefore abortion should be kept legal because sometimes a woman needs that. And to me, that's the exact opposite of what the word of God says. Because the very purpose for which civil government exists is to establish justice.

And justice would be Romans 13, very clearly to punish and execute murderers. That's what Romans 13 talks about. That's what God's designed for human civil government all the way back to Genesis chapter nine, verse six is that God ordained human civil government to punish murderers specifically.

And he was saying, no, no, we ought to legalize murder in this particular category and not punish the murderers at all.

So this is very interesting. So you're, so he's rising the ladder in the free church while you have been pushed down the ladder, I guess is one way to say it.

Or out.

Or out, yeah. And very telling, I guess, as onlookers look on and see what's going on here, the direction of the movement. Okay, so you had

By the way, that video is still up.

That video is still on the EFCU website.

Right, so in other words, there's no renunciation of that teaching as well. That was wrong, we need to remove it. It's still available.

Sure, okay. Okay, so you had that conversation with these three pastors where they were horrified, their words, by your messages and then what happened next?

Well, at the end of that conversation, they said, basically, we want you to answer us, us three pastors and tell us if you will leave the evangelical free church. And I thought about that. And then later after the conversation was over, I said, what authority do they have to ask that question?

They're not in a position at that time at the district level, which would be the level at which such a question would be posed. They were not in any position of authority to do that. Even as an, on the national board, which Bill Rydell was on the national board at the time, he wasn't the chairman.

So I didn't answer their question. And that, I think, upset them. And they talked to denominational officials. And it was before my ordination was being reconsidered as it is every so many years by the national board of ministerial standing, that just days before that meeting was taking place in September, 2022, so more than a year after the meeting with those first three pastors, John Nesbitt, who's the operations director, which I kind of take as somebody who now handles kind of the backroom things and so forth.

But anyway, he demanded a meeting with me and he apologized that it had to be so short-term because it had to be before the national board of ministerial standing meeting took place in September. So he, and I asked him as well, give me a list of questions that you're going to ask me in this meeting.

He gave me a few general vague questions, but his compatriot, Paulo Freire, who is on the board of ministerial standing, did not give me all the questions he had. And he was reading a list of 11 questions he had.

He did not submit those to me ahead of time. Which again, if you're going to follow biblical standards of fairness and justice, this has been hammered out for like 1900 years of among Christians who study the word of God, they've concluded due process, what we call due process is really the biblical standards of justice.

And one of those is that if you're going to be questioned and queried, you're given an opportunity to prepare for that questioning with the questions in advance. As the first three pastors did not give me a list of questions, John gave me a partial list, Paulo gave me none.

And in this meeting, it began with John saying, well, we have complaints about you. Oh, complaints of, you know? Oh yeah, some people from your congregation. And I asked them, could you tell me the names of these individuals who've complained?

And he complained that he claimed he had two or three, he couldn't quite remember and so on and so forth. But both he and Paulo refused to give me the names of those who were making accusations against me as an elder.

It's like, wow, that's curious. You don't believe it's appropriate that I know the names of those who are making an accusation. This is against the biblical standards of justice. You get to face who your accusers are.

Deuteronomy 19, by the way, puts a very severe penalty on those who make false accusations. And clearly Matthew 18 and clearly first Timothy chapter five talk about the great care that has to be taken when an elder is being accused.

And, you know, but they said, no, no, no, we're not going to tell you the names of these. And I, at that point, I might've just said, okay, well, the meeting's over. If you're not going to follow biblical standards of justice, there's no point in continuing.

But I did and answered all their questions, their lengthy dialogue, about two and a half hours.

Yeah.

Questions about this, that, and the other. And the complaints were, at least the complaints they revealed to me, I'm not sure they didn't have additional accusations they did not reveal to me. And let me share a little bit why I believe that might be the case.

But the complaints were two, you don't have elders.

Really?

Wow.

According to your constitution, you don't have elders. Like, I'm sorry, my constitution, our church constitution clearly states that the pastor is an elder. Yes, he's an elder among the other elders. And it's true at this point in time, I am the only elder.

And that has been a process where some people have moved and left and during COVID, so on, that's taken place. But it's not that we don't have an elder. It's just that we have one elder. And John said, that's unacceptable.

Well, wait a minute.

And you used to have multiple elders, right?

Yes, we did.

And our constitution does not require multiple elders. It's a good idea. I agree with it. And when we have people properly prepared, excuse me, people properly prepared, we will have those elevated to that position to serve in the body.

So that was one accusation, which is a false accusation. The second accusation is that we did not have a congregational meeting in 2021. Now, our congregational meeting, yes, it's required by our constitution.

We did have meetings, but we did not have a quorum. So we were not able to conduct any business officially during that year. So I'm thinking about, wait a minute, you're on me for not having a congregational meeting when there's a whole spate of other churches in this district, out of the hundred some churches in this district, 90 plus percent of them, probably 95 of them or more, closed their doors to public worship in violation of Hebrews 10, in my view.

And there's no discipline, but you didn't have a congregational meeting. So we're gonna bust your chops over this. It's like, well, this is really strange. Living in a bizarre land where obviously there was difficulty having a quorum, given the times that we were going through.

So, you know, John finished his questions and he turned it over to Paul Oak, who asked a series of questions. And here it comes back to the Christian nationalism. Basically these questions were to determine, David, are you a Christian nationalist?

And I asked Paul Oak, can you define the term Christian nationalist for me? And he's, we don't have a fixed definition. In fact, he said that there's so many different definitions out there. It's kind of lost its value, but that didn't stop him from going through the 11 questions.

Are you a Christian nationalist? And I objected in these questions to be labeled a Christian nationalist because I view it as a pejorative used to smear Christians that are not liked by non-Christians or other Christians.

Yeah, it was the same charge made against Pastor Jeff Kluwer.

Correct.

And many more.

Yes.

Out, you know, in different denominations that it's, I mean, that's a red flag. If they call you a Christian nationalist, what do you mean by that? I guess that needs to be the next question.

What's the definition of that?

If this is so horrible, can you tell us what makes it so horrible?

Right.

And how can you identify a Christian nationalist if you don't have a definition of it?

Yep.

So we went through the 11 questions. At the end of the 11 questions, Paul has said to me, David, I know you say you are not a Christian nationalist. I reject that term. I would call myself a Biblicist.

I follow what the Bible teaches in everything. I'm not perfect, but as best I can, I follow it in everything, including what the Bible teaches about the separate jurisdictional authority of church and state, and that the state is not over the church.

No.

They're separate. Neither is the church over the state. As, you know, Roman Catholicism through most of the middle ages, the church was above the state. That's not right either. Both of those are wrong.

This is the correct biblical understanding. And, you know, so he said, I know you reject the term Christian nationalist. You claim you are not a Christian nationalist, but David, I believe you are a Christian nationalist.

Yeah.

You can't define this term, but you've just labeled me with this term. I don't get this. It does not compute. And, you know, I

Pastor David, real quick here. So what you explained, this irrastinarianism, is that how you say it?

Irrastinarianism, yeah.

Yeah.

This is actually presented on John MacArthur's documentary, The Essential Church, where this was one of their justifications of reopening. They came to the realization, we haven't been taught well, and the government is not over the church.

These are two separate bodies, as you have well showed with those two ornaments. So, yeah, it's interesting that if anybody thinks this is such a radical thing that Pastor Whitney did, well, John MacArthur did this.

So if you like John MacArthur, I mean, this is, I mean, John MacArthur will probably go down as one of the greatest Christian leaders in the history of the church. I mean, he's like Charles Spurgeon. So this is not some radical position that he's holding to.

So I just wanted to make that point here, but I'll let you continue.

Oh, thank you. Because, you know, that was the surprise to me that this was even being addressed.

Yeah.

When, if you were going to say, we need to discipline churches, or at least instruct churches, this would have been the thing to be instructing churches during 2020 about, the separation of powers. Civil government does not have the power to shut the doors of the church of Jesus Christ.

In fact, it never had had that in any time in the history of the world. Why did the Christians meet in the catacombs? Well, the civil government was going to persecute them if they discovered them. So the underground church existed, but they didn't stop worshiping simply because Caesar said, no.

It continued. So at the end of this conversation, John complimented me. He said, you've been honest, you've been open, you've responded to all our questions, you've responded very well. We're pleased with this and so forth and so on.

And we closed the meeting and he said, I'm going to contact you about, you know, a request I will have. And that request that followed this made no sense to me at all. Because he wanted a list of all of our attendees and all of their contact information, phone number, email, et cetera.

Wow.

Address, all their contact information. It's like, why would you want the contact? And, you know, I responded to that request saying, you know, we make a promise to the people in our congregation that whenever they share any information with us of their contact information, whether phone number or email or anything at all, we will not share that with a soul.

It will never be shared with anyone unless they give us explicit permission to do so. So I responded to John's request. We do not have permission from anybody in our congregation to share that information with you.

The second request he had was information about all of our, I think, past five years of congregational meetings. He wanted all the minutes to that. And would have been fine, probably under normal circumstances, but our church secretary, knowing of the content of the conversation, because I shared with not the whole congregation, but a segment of the congregation, what this conversation with Paulo Freire and John Nesbitt was like and what questions they were asking.

And the fact that it wasn't following biblical standards of justice. And the church secretary said, no, this is inappropriate. Unless they're willing to follow biblical standards of justice, there's no point in giving them any additional information.

Certainly not the contact information of our congregation, nor our minutes and the budget and all the rest of it. The other request had to do with all the financial information. They wanted all the budgets for the past.

They wanted all the financial records and they wanted all the bank statements and all that information as well. And our stewardship deacon, likewise knowing that already an unjust process was taking place, an unbiblical process was taking place.

Well, wait a minute. Is there some accusation we don't know about here? Are they making some accusation that they haven't revealed? Because the only two they revealed is that you don't have elders. That was false.

And that you didn't have a congregational meeting in 2021, which given, okay, we could not form a quorum, so forth.

Yeah.

It's like what do I get to do with all this information they're demanding right now?

Yeah.

In the political realm, you see this. I mean, we've seen this recently, right? With president Trump. It's like, what is the crime? What are they trying to find here?

Right.

And what someone said is that they're trying to find a crime.

Yes.

And that obviously violates the standards of biblical justice, right? We're not, biblical justice doesn't say we wanna find where this guy is wrong. It's, we're only gonna address this is if this comes up, right?

Innocent until proven guilty.

And a just civil government and a just church government doesn't go on a fishing expedition trying to find, oh yeah, you tore the tag off your pillow and the pillow tag police are gonna come and find you because it's illegal to tear the pillow tag off, crazy things like that.

No, a just civil government does not go doing these kind of fishing expeditions. So the treasurer said, our stewardship deacon said, no, this is not appropriate. They're not following biblical standards of justice to begin with.

So we responded to John Nesbitt that neither of the five documents they were requesting or the five sets of documents they were requesting were going to be available to them. And, you know, be glad to deal with whatever else really relates to charges.

If there are some charges and John admitted, he said, well, David, this is not a court. It's like, oh, what do you mean? This is not, and he repeated that several times in emails and I realized, oh, oh, I get it.

He's saying, you don't have due process here in the evangelical free church. If you're accused of something, you get no due process. We're not gonna follow due process. And I'm scratching my head thinking, wait a minute.

I know enough about the history of the church that for century after century, these issues were hammered out. St. Patrick is the first one who wrote Legae Ex Moesius, the laws of Moses, where he was dealing with the pagan Irish, no offense, Seth, but the Irish before they came to Christ were very deep into their paganism.

He not only led them to Christ and when he established the church, gave them a Bible, he also gave them this book. It was basically God's law expounded in practical everyday life. And this book spread way beyond Ireland.

It spread to Scotland. It spread to the mainland and it spread to England where a tutor of a young fellow by the name of Alfred taught him God's law from St. Patrick's book. And that Alfred became King Alfred the Great who established English common law by taking St. Patrick's book.

And the only thing he did, he added an exposition of his own of the Beatitudes at the beginning of that book. And that became the foundation of English common law, which is the foundation of American common law that's actually referenced in our United States constitution, referenced in the Maryland constitution and many other state constitutions as the law of the land, God's word, God's law.