By What Standard?

I want their faith to not just be something that stands, but something around which culture can be built.

We want students who can think critically about arguments, but also about the culture around them, that can then speak clearly to it, and that also have the ability to influence and shape because of the power of their message, because that's really what the gospel does.

The gospel throws down all the arguments against it. It speaks to the hearts of people, it influences, and it changes. Go to ApologiaStudios .com, get signed up, partner with us on all access. You get all of the radio programs, you get the TV show, you get the after show, including Apologia Academy, and you partner with us in ministry, bringing the gospel around the world.

The By What Standard Film and the Gospel’s Cultural Power

Thank you guys for watching tonight, next week with Jeff Durbin, I am here with Luke the Bear. What up? And we're here with our live studio audience, thank you guys for joining us tonight. So obviously we just had a great conversation with Tom Askle and Jared Longshore, and we're talking about By What Standard, and obviously we didn't get into the huge controversy that took place fairly recently when the first trailer was dropped, but I guess we'll sort of leave that aside for now.

But I'm very excited about the film, we know everyone on the inside of it who's part of making it, and they're doing some important work. And so I hope that people get to see By What Standard because of this show, pointing towards it, I think the issue beneath all of this is the fundamental issue of life, By What Standard.

Exactly. And they're addressing issues that are affecting the SBC, and not just the SBC, but other organizations that were longstanding, solid Christian organizations, trusted organizations, that have now been infiltrated by all of these different things, like critical race theory, intersectionality, and cultural Marxism.

And the thing that is interesting to me, before I get to what you have written down, is that when you look at the Marxist playbook, and the neo-Marxists, I mean, they did what they said they were going to do.

And what's interesting is that they do it first, of course, culturally, broadly, but now that arrow is directed right towards the heart of the church, and they've infiltrated the church with all of these different ungodly and worldly philosophies and theories, and it's surprising to see solid Christian organizations adopt these things relatively easily.

Yeah, really quickly, too. Really quickly.

Yeah, it's happening at just a rapid pace. I mean, we talk a lot with Pastor James about just the speed at which we've gone down in terms of just gender and sexuality. When we had Dr. Brown on recently, we just recently dropped that stonewall, the thing that you and I did with him, and in there, I forgot that he had mentioned that when he wrote A Queer Thing Happened to America, and he put it out in 2011, I think it was, when it came out, 10 or 11, he had mentioned some things in that book, like, this is what we're looking forward to.

He said, but who would have imagined that within the space of just really a few years of me writing that book, that we would be where we're at now in terms of gender, a father in Canada being threatened with immediate arrest because he called his, I forget which gender it was, but if he called his little boy he, when he is identifying as a she, he could be arrested within the space of a couple years of writing that book.

Who would have thought that Bruce Jenner would be called Woman of the Year within the space of a few years of writing that book, or that we would have a woman under threat of lawsuit and who's being vilified because she won't wax a man's giblets who's saying he's a female you know what I mean, in Canada, and yeah, so I mean, it's a crazy place, but that's happening culturally, but the amazing thing is, you might be tempted to say, okay, I understand what happens culturally, I get it, but the fact that now all this stuff is being adopted by Christian communions, relatively solid Christian communions, I mean, even down to issues like homosexuality, where people are debating over sort of like the very, well, you know, is it a homosexual desire?

Is that a sin? You know, I like what Andrew said, let's call it what it is, a temptation, a homosexual temptation. Yeah, let's stop trying to blur what we're talking about here, you know, whether or not homosexual desire is a sin or if it's the acting on it, it's like, well, I think Jesus pretty much addressed that when he talks about what's in the heart, but just this redefinition going on that's actually happening within the church.

My fear, Pastor Luke, is to see solid Christian communions fall prey to all this to the degree that they actually start letting in neo-Marxists, people who are professed, like, I don't hold to that perspective, or like, they don't hold to inerrancy, they don't hold to the word of God as a foundation, and for us to sort of just sort of start yielding to the culture because we want to celebrate victims in our culture, and that's what I really think it is, is that, and I heard one of our friends talking about this recently, is as Christians, we've been taught, because of the core part of our faith, to favor the victim, our hero is the victim, Jesus was the victim, and so what we do is we actually start allowing for our praise of the victim to become perverse, to the degree that if someone says, I'm a evangelical, celebrating them as heroes, because the central hero of the story was made a victim, but the only problem with that is it becomes perverse, because just because I'm a victim doesn't make me an authority, and that's important.

Victimhood, Authority, and Christian Courage

Yeah, I think you're referring to Toby. Was it Toby that said that? Yeah, I've heard him speak, well, we had him on the show talk about it, and if you guys haven't seen his talk from ReformCon, you might want to just go watch that as soon as this is on.

It's in a thread, Apologia Studios, wherever you're at, that Toby's message is somewhere in there.

The best message I've seen all year, but one of the things that he said that I love is he said we should reject, as Christians, we should reject all invitations or temptations to victimhood, because we're never truly innocent, and we have a perfect victim, and so that's.

Kind of getting to the root of that issue, that Christ is the victim, there's no reason for us to play the victim. That's right, and I think that the world knows that they can play off the emotions of the Christian church by claiming victimhood, and by demanding that you love me, love me, and I demand that you love your neighbor right now, and so I want you to do what I say, and in doing what I say, you'll be loving your neighbor, and never mind the fact that God's defined it as sin, I still want you to love me, and accept exactly what I'm doing, and my lifestyle, my sexuality, my gender confusion, whatever the case may be.

All right, so I know you have something written down there. It's funny, actually, before I get to this, even, because we're talking about Christmas and all that, my wife and I were talking about Rudolph last night, the red-nosed reindeer.

You know, the elf, he didn't want to be an elf, because he wanted to be a dentist, and so there's this whole conversation about maybe, was it a political thing, and was he, you know, like an image of him being a homosexual, and all that, you know, I've heard that before, and I don't disagree with maybe that's what they were doing, but like, I was saying to her, even if that's what they were doing, the reason everyone was upset with him wasn't because he wanted to be a dentist, but because he was trying to be something he wasn't, and so it was like, even if they were making a political move to say, you know, well, this is what's happening in the homosexual community, people were upset because he was trying to be something he wasn't, not because he wanted to be something different than he wanted to be, and so just an interesting commentary, but to kind of tie the room together, if you will, again, talking about Christmas and by what standard, so I just saw this right before I was looking for something fun to talk about, and in Durham, New Hampshire, they just announced that they're replacing their annual Christmas celebration with what they're calling the Frost Fest, which apparently is not going over well.

People are sending him like nasty emails, like the people are upset, but just to get the point here, so they're eliminating tree lighting, they're eliminating Santa, and they want to eliminate the Christian aspects while being more inclusive, that's what they're saying, but then the reason that this made me laugh is because, and this is how it comes together here, is they're still using things like wreaths with stars, so they're still using stars, and so I'm sitting here thinking, and where do the stars come from?

Which store does that come from? Exactly, and so just by what standard then, so here they are trying to eliminate something that's Christian, but they're still using this Christian influence, so they have no ultimate standard then for even eliminating the stuff they're celebrating to begin with.

Christmas, Frost Fest, and Cultural Inconsistency

Yeah, that's right. And so I think that's just, it's like a microcosm picture of the culture in general, of what we're talking about with Tom and Jared.

That's right, yeah, and did you hear about the McDonald's that... With the Nativity scene? The Nativity scene? I was thinking, people are up in arms like, McDonald's, you know, Nativity, and it's like, I think they're going to make bank, because what they need to realize is that the voices that oppose the Christian worldview and the beauty of the Christian worldview and all of this cultural Christianity that's still just unavoidable, they're so small compared to really those who would profess, I'm not saying that everyone who professes Christianity to believe in Christ is truly a Christian, but the voices that are opposed to Christian culture, the Christian worldview, the biblical worldview are so small.

It's one of the things that our friend recently said, if just 25 of the Christian church actually started being bold with their faith and speaking against these cultural issues, we would win in a moment, because it's really such a small number of people who actually adopt these different perspectives.

It just really takes just the courage that the church is called to have in these areas. And it's interesting too, because we've said this a lot, I think a lot of people will go, like, what? When you say cowards go to hell, the Bible actually says, read the book of Revelation, do a word study, look at the word coward and find it, and find it in the book of Revelation, and who's in a lake of fire?

Cowards. And being a coward, not being courageous is a sin. Not doing what you ought to do in difficult circumstances that God calls you to do is a sin, being a coward is a sin. And I think we're dealing with that great sin of cowardice in the Christian church in the West, is we love our comfort so dang much, we love the idols of our pleasure so dang much more than we love God's truth.

And so we would rather be comfortable, and we were satisfied with our idols. And it was interesting, did you hear what Tom said? You were in the back when he was saying that a lot of these Christians from foreign nations now, they come to here, to the West, they come to the United States, and they see the expression of Christianity in our culture and Christian communities, and they're like, what is this?

Like, this is strange. It's a lifeless expression of the Christian faith. They're sending evangelists. They're sending missionaries to us, they need to. And that ought to cause us all to wince when we hear that, and I think it should cause us to rise up.

But it gets back to what Tom was talking about, and what Jared was talking about, is it by what standard? Because that's the ultimate question. It came up, of course, in the debate that you and I were recently at, we did together in Utah.

We went out to serve there, and to do that debate with the atheists, the secularists in Utah. That was the whole thing of the debate, by what standard? You're complaining about the moral problems, you're complaining about contradictions, well, by what standard?

You don't have one. The world doesn't have a coherent standard to base anything off of, whether it's morally, whether it's scientifically, whether it's logically, they don't have a standard, and they're just trying to create their own.

They're all the little gods of their system, and they're trying to create their own, and so they have no standard. So, that really becomes one of our favorite things we say to people when we're challenging them on what they believe is by what standard.

And one of our favorite books. And one of our favorite books, Dr. Greg Bonson, by the way, get that book. It's easy to remember, the film we talked about today is the name of the book, Dr. Greg Bonson, get it, and I'm sorry, you're now a theonomist.

I believe we also have some of that up on our All Access. That's right, yes, yes. So, we have to get back to this main point, because we were just talking about this during the break, during the commercial break, that the history of the church, we have to be cautious, and I was recently talking about this with someone I love, we have to be cautious with thinking about the history of the church at, let's say, the first couple of centuries or the first thousand years as the golden age of the church.

It's really dangerous to do that. It's dangerous to look at the second century of the church and think it's a golden age, just because people were closer to the time of Jesus, just because you're John's disciple, doesn't mean it's the golden age.

The church is in its infancy. It was just born. And so, we hadn't had to face yet all the doctrinal difficulties. We didn't have to get as precise as we needed to be when Arius pops up, or Sibelius pops up, or whoever the case may be.

So, we have to be cautious thinking about the church as any type of golden age of the church. God's been sanctifying the church throughout the ages. And I was saying at the break, the first thousand years of the church, to my mind, the biggest debates and doctrinal distortions and controversies are surrounding the nature of God.

Who is Jesus, the Trinity? Of course, Scripture, the foundation of Scripture is there, and you've got the resurrection of Jesus. You have issues related to like Christ and His nature. Like, is He truly God and truly man?

Is He half God, half man? There's that whole Nestorian debate that's in there. So, it's like those kinds of issues. But then as you turn into the second millennium of the church, then you're having the church now deal with issues of justification.

And by what standard question was the central issue of the Reformation? Is the church doesn't give the Word of God its authority. It has inherent self-attesting authority. The church is created by the Word of God.

It doesn't create the Word of God. So, it's the ultimate authority. So, that was central, but then the issues of like justification, the sovereignty of God, the grace of God and salvation become like central part of the debates.

The doctrines of grace, controversy comes out of the Reformation. So, I think God is sharpening the church there in the area of like sovereignty, grace, faith, justification. But it seems to me, and we've always had difficulties culturally with the church in history, but it seems to me like where we're at now, Pastor Lucas, we are at a place where the major fights are now by what standard in terms of what's the church's mission and by what standard in terms of justice, law and culture and society, morality, right?

Because it's not that we didn't have homosexuals to deal with early in the centuries of the church. Like there were homosexual parades coming through the city that Augustine was like aghast at. That happened.

So, it's not like it's new that homosexuality is a thing, but it's like now you've got what was once a predominantly Christian culture that has been completely subverted by people who want to say all is one.

There is no gender identity that I have to hold to. There's no ultimate truth. Everything's subjective. I'm the maker of my own system, my own ethical system. We are the makers of our own system. We're our own gods.

So, people today don't even know that if you have a penis, you're a man. Can you imagine? I can't believe I just said that. It's 2019. If you'd have told me when I was a kid that people would actually, not very long from now, people are going to say, just because I have a penis doesn't make me a man.

People have been like, what in the world? That's silly. No one's that stupid. No one's that ignorant. No one is that foolish to say, I know I have a penis, but on Tuesday, I was a lady. Today, I'm a little gender confused.

I might want to go back to male today. I watched a video. It was like an instructional video of people actually going into a classroom with children, and I got through 45 seconds. I had to turn it off.

Oh, I know what you're talking about. You know what I'm talking about? I didn't watch it, but I know what you're talking about. Yeah, 45 seconds. I had to turn it off. I couldn't take it. It was so absurd on the face of it.

I couldn't take it that these people are grown people, and they're grown people who have embraced the most asinine, and they're loving it. Children, just because, and these kids were like, I think the question was asked to them was like, you know, if you have male genitalia, are you a man?

They were like, true or false, and all the kids were like, male genitalia, true, right? They were like, not necessarily. Yeah, just because you have that doesn't mean you're a man. It's like, these kids are like, oh, all right.

Well, that's news to me. Like, you know, and so, and it's disturbing, but it's amazing because we tend to think about like theological disputes, very abstract, and we get really critical and like very deep with like theological and philosophical things, and we're like, we want to work up here and the tough stuff, but it's amazing.

Like, you abandon Jesus and culture, and all the most basic things are up for grabs at this point. Like, it's not the tough stuff of justice, really. Like, those get questioned, but like, we're at the most basic thing.

Like, by what standard, male and female? Like, people are like, well, not really. Like, not necessarily male, not necessarily female. Could be anything. In terms of sexuality, by what standard? Well, whatever you please.

And if you're fluid, well, then you're fluid. Like, you know, you can like men one day and women another day, and you can have no defining sexuality another day, and it's really just whatever, you know, floats your boat, whatever suits your fancy for the day.

It's fine. So, like, I feel like at the most rudimentary parts of life now, because we have, we don't know how to answer the question by what standard. We don't even know what a man is or a woman is. We don't know what marriage is.

We don't know what love is. We don't know what truth is. We don't know what justice is. And the amazing thing is, is that our society actually thinks it's going to get along. You know what I mean? It's like you and I were talking where, it was with, it was when we did the show with Stonewall.

We mentioned how we were in Greenwich Village, and we mentioned that we were there for some time in that whole area, and there were no children. Yeah, no. None. No kids. Whatsoever. But everywhere else we went.

There was kids. Children. Times Square, wherever we were going, there were children everywhere. But when we got to Greenwich Village, and we're going to where the original spot was, or Margaret Sanger's first clinic was, and we're going to Stonewall, no kids.

Nope. Because their worldview doesn't create life. No, it destroys it. And it doesn't really create a culture that works. And so, yeah, I think it's amazing that the question being asked by Tom and Jared to the church, by what standard, is the ultimate question right now.

By what standard? That's the central theme. By what standard? By what standard in the church? By what standard.

In culture and society? By what standard? Yeah. I think you nailed it. I've heard a lot recently, a lot of things coming up where people are, especially from like cults like Mormons or from Roman Catholics, where they're trying to prove false doctrine by taking quotes from the church fathers.

You know, a lot of times the quotes are completely out of context. Of course. But I've seen that a lot recently. Yeah. Several times. And I'm saying, who cares? Because they're not our standard. Right.

Again, it goes back to by what standard? Because God's word is our standard. I don't care. I mean, are the church fathers and their quotes helpful? Yeah. But is that our standard? No. So ultimately, if they say something that doesn't jive with scripture, I don't care.

That doesn't change anything. That's exactly right. And I've been saying too a lot recently, it's funny just looking back how from where we started with Apologia to where we are now and how right off, like when we first started Apologia Radio, remember that was we had American Vision on and we're talking about God's law and is the standard of everything.

Yeah. And that I mean, for me, that was the first I'd really heard some of that stuff. And it's like now every issue, every issue that's major that we're talking about goes back to God's law. God's word is the standard.

Everything. That's right. And so I've been thankful and encouraged because it's like, OK. God was preparing us early on without us even realizing that that we need to be able to answer stuff. And honestly, a lot of the church can't answer a lot of these questions because they're not using God's words.

Because you have guys like.

Scripture, Church History, and the Reformation Standard

Andy Stanley, who I debated on Unbelievable, who is a popular pastor. His show comes on his show. Sorry. Forgive me. I didn't mean to say that. I mean, his sermon came on. It comes on after Saturday Night Live.

So, you know, people know who he is and his message is getting out there. He says things like we need to unhitch the Old Testament from the New Testament. The Ten Commandments, even the Ten Commandments are not obligatory for Christians today.

So when you have popular, when you have pop culture, evangelical pastors telling Christians, none of that is relevant anymore, right? It's no wonder then that Christians are ineffective in society because you have this sort of Neo-Marxian view of unhitching the old from the new, where that's irrelevant, where now you have Christians who can't respond to the culture because they're afraid to say because God says.

That was one of the central parts of my debate with Andy Stanley. If anyone watches that debate, you'll see that that was the main thrust is that Andy Stanley's perspective at the bottom is that we don't hold to God's self-attesting word.

Andy is very timid. I don't want to say afraid. He's timid. He's cautious. He doesn't want to say it's true because God says. He wants to put it somewhere else on someone else's witness or some event in history.

He doesn't really like for Christians to say, God says, that's it. That's not a central thing for him. And so because we have that propagated today with Christians, like not because God says and the Old Testament's irrelevant, we don't have an answer.

So it's interesting when other image bearers of God who are fallen, who have a sense of justice and a desire for justice, when they see people suffering, they want to solve the problem of suffering from their perspective.

So they create these very complicated systems of social justice that are not justice at all. They're actually quite evil and oppressive. And Christians sort of hang out in the background. They go, I don't have anything to say about that.

Like that's not of any concern to me. And it's like, well, no wonder the world goes to hell in a handbasket. Christians are the ones that are ready to, you know, zip out. And I think a lot of this has to do with eschatology.

We are totally burned up with a very bad eschatology in the West and we want to depart rather than impact. And that's our soul's satisfaction is let me get out. And the more things crumble around us, the more excited we are, because it means at any moment we're leaving behind our undies.

And that's our great joy is getting taken out of here. But for Christians in history, you don't see that perspective. Christians in history would go into nations to win the entire nation to Christ. The Puritans were trying to build Christian societies and cultures.

They were coming to win everything to Christ. They saw the victory of Jesus as the ultimate goal in this life. So when the Puritans were setting up communities, when they were trying to say like, well, how do we handle the issue of justice?

It wasn't even a question. Like if you would have stood up and tried to be creative, they would have looked at you very squinty eyed and say, like what? If somebody says, well, how do we deal with the issue of theft in our society?

People would go, what did God say here? Okay. You got to repay that. And you got to pay it back double. Who says, well, God says right there, what if someone raped somebody in our community? Oh, well, what's God?

Okay. They're going to get capital punishment. Well, how do we determine if somebody actually is guilty? Oh, you need two to three independent witnesses only on that basis. And you know, all of this stuff, even in like jurisprudence and like law, all of it was based upon scripture.

That was their standard. Christians today have no response typically because we've fallen so far away from that standard. We don't think that that even matters anymore. And it's.

The Church’s Standard for Law, Justice, and Cultural Witness

Been deadly. Yeah. It's killing our witness. Well, they're talking about the SBC. It's killing the.

SBC. Yeah. Because look what happens, social justice warriors get into the SBC and all these other organizations, they infiltrate and they say, hey guys, there's all these victims. There's all this injustice.

Christians, you care about justice, right? Christians go, I'm supposed to care about that, right? Yeah. Okay. Yes. I care about that. And they go, we have the answer. And then by what standard? That's the ultimate thing.

Christians are supposed to have an answer to all that. And it's supposed to come from scripture. And I think we need to get back. We need reformation in the church. So it's the church reforming, reformed and always reforming, always reforming back to the scriptures and the word of God.

And I believe with all my heart, that's the passion of Tom and Jared here is to reform the church in this area. And to be honest with you, praise God for his providence and his sovereignty and even the difficulty.

God causes all things to work together for good. I said something that I think surprised someone the other day. I said, praise God for Arius. Arius was a wicked heretic. Yeah. Who got punched in the face by St. Nicholas.

St. Nicholas, right? That's the tradition says. And praise God for Marcion. Total heretic, evil, evil man. Praise God for Sibelius. Praise God for Jacob Arminius. And I don't mean that in terms of positive.

I mean that in terms of, I praise God that he allowed false teaching to be present so the church can put it down. And so it might sound strange, but thank God for his providence that even in this moment with all this sin and all this evil and all this doctrinal and philosophical corruption, he's allowing it for the church to get purified and to look back to the standard to say, this is the answer.

And so I pray, I hope that you and I will be with the Lord 500 years from now. And we'll be looking down at a church that looks back 500 years and says, can you believe that Christians didn't think that we should look to the law of God and this is the standard in terms of these cultural issues.

Can you believe that there was a time in history where Christians actually tolerated that? Like, isn't that amazing? That's my hope for the church. And I hope this film takes everyone to that place by what standard.

All right, guys. So as always, thank you guys for watching next week with Jeff Durbin. That is Pastor Luke the Bear. I'm Jeff Durbin. You guys can go to endabortionnow .com. Get your church equipped to go and bring the gospel to local abortion mills.

Also, please do not forget, we are so happy about this and honored that Babies Are Still Murdered here is now on Amazon Prime. Make sure you guys go there, watch the film. And if you would, leave a review and a rating so that they can get kicked up into Amazon's suggested videos.

If you haven't seen it yet, go watch it there. If you don't have Amazon Prime, go watch it on YouTube. Go watch it on Facebook. Babies Are Still Murdered here. Make sure you share that. And most importantly, make sure you get connected with endabortionnow .com to get your church connected.

And you can join us in the fight to ultimately end, abolish, criminalize, ban abortion once and for all. Thank you guys for watching. Catch you guys next week right here on Next Week. Thank you guys.