Various Woke Explosions, Tim Keller, then Trent Horn

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. We are in the AOMAX studio. You do not have to adjust your sound.

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So we are planning on doing a radio -free Geneva tomorrow. We'll be looking especially at William Lane Craig's attempt to deal with Romans chapter 9.

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We hope to be in here and utilizing it for the first time for radio -free

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Geneva because we have really cool theme songs to go along with it.

So it's fun. Before we dive into everything today, on Twitter there are a couple of accounts that keep causing problems by investing time and effort in letting all the rest of us know about what woke folks are doing.

Woke Preacher Clips is one of those accounts.

Earlier today, I saw this clip and I listened to it.

Before I left home this morning, I saw it and I was like, what is this fellow talking about?

I don't even begin to understand this. The fellow by his name is

Tim Gombas. I'm sure he's Tim Gombas, PhD in numerous things,

I would assume. You can sort of tell immediately you've got the soft, fluffy chairs and the table in between.

I almost ended up in a soft, fluffy chair debate once. We showed up at Biola in 2006 and they had set up two soft, fluffy chairs for Shabir Ali and I.

Our first words to the young guys were, no, no, no. We need tables.

Shabir is going to need a table because he's going to want to be able to write and things like that.

No little flowers. We're not just going to be sitting there having a nice little conversation. We're actually having a debate.

Yes, and the kids loved it. The students loved it. I'm not sure if they would anymore.

Anyway, you've got your two fluffy chairs and then the one guy with the New York City t -shirt on under the jacket.

That's cool. I'll do that. I don't do that much like that. Jackets are great.

I'm wearing a jacket today because jackets will cover a multitude of sins. They truly do.

They're great. So anyways, what you have here is a incredible example of the overriding authority of critical theory that has now just exploded in the academy.

Just exploded. And this is what this is why we need local churches to be banding together to support the few colleges and seminaries or the left that are not engaging in this kind of utterly incoherent thought.

That's just the only way you can describe it. It's just utterly incoherent. Here is a

PhD in New Testament who is about to say something about the Old Testament, which sometimes can be dangerous in of itself.

But I want you to hear what is said in this situation and think with me about what the text is.

I need to avail myself of being able to hear this as well. Let's listen to what is said.

That doesn't want to stay there, so we'll just do it this way. All right. What I need to think about as a

Christian person is thinking about powers and authorities and systems and all that kind of stuff. I want to know in what ways am

I being drawn up into power games and systemic injustices that are landing on my brothers and sisters in Christ in ways that are bringing about suffering in their lives and marginalization for them.

And even people that are not Christian. Okay, hopefully you're hearing all the all the key buzzwords, you know, all the power stuff, oppression, you know, none of this has anything to do with me, but this is the stuff, you know, getting sucked up into these power things.

It's just, it's all the buzzwords, but more to it.

In what ways is suffering being brought about in their lives? I'm struck by this thought in Israel.

In Old Testament Israel, there were always foreigners in the land of Israel, and foreigners worshipped other gods.

And interestingly, God says to Israel, do not mistreat the foreigner.

Do not mistreat that person. If you do, if he cries out to me, this one who worships other gods, and may not even say to me, but if he cries out,

I will hear him, and I will kill you. That's what God says to his people.

That gets my attention. Okay, so I immediately was like, where is that?

I remember a section about foreigners and strangers, and there are a couple different Hebrew terms that are used there.

So I started doing some running around, and I would suggest you look at, you can just look up foreigners and strangers, read everything that's in the

Old Testament. It doesn't take you very long. There aren't that many references. And you'll see that the foreigners and the strangers, there are laws about equal application of law and things like that, but then there are other places where, for example, you can charge them interest.

You can't charge the people of Israel interest, but you can charge them interest. So there's some interesting things there, but I eventually found what he was referring to, and I guess the point was that here you have people who are not even worshiping the one true

God, and if you mistreat them, then God will kill you. But I think that's what he said, wasn't it?

Okay, he's talking about Exodus chapter 22. It's the only text that even comes close. Let's read the context, shall we?

It's always such an important thing to do. And if a man seduces a virgin who is not engaged and lies with her, he must pay a dowry for her to be his wife.

If her father absolutely refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equal to the dowry for virgins. And so we have dowries going on.

We have rich forgetting to turn his ringer off, which then is used to remind everyone else in the room to make sure that their ringer is off.

That's how this happens in church. This is how it happens. But I was just making sure.

I had already done mine, but have you ever noticed that in church? As soon as somebody, one, it only takes one now. We have now become very well trained.

It's almost like Pavlov's dog. As soon as that sound, everyone starts going, was that me?

Was that me? And it only happens once, except for the person who was asleep during the time that went off the first time.

But anyways, so back to what we were talking about, which sometimes I can't even remember what I was talking about when

I get interrupted by one of those things. We are talking about the, interestingly enough here, the seduction of a virgin who is not engaged and lies with her.

He must pay a dowry for her to be. We could spend quite some time talking about the justice of God's law in these, because these things are attacked so often, but that's not where we are.

I just wanted to provide the context. So these are various and sundry laws. Verse 18, you shall not allow a sorceress to live.

Okay, you shall not allow a sorceress to live. I think the King James says a witch to live. Verse 19, whoever lies with an animal shall surely be put to death.

Nothing here about, you know, once Brokeback Mountain, Eeyore version comes out or something like that, that now the society can change its viewpoints and things like that.

No, whoever lies with an animal shall surely be put to death. He who sacrifices to any

God other than to Yahweh alone. And again, I know everyone in this audience, unless it's first time ever watched, is well aware that L -O -R -D in caps is

Yahweh. In the printed version, that O and the R and the D would be a smaller font size, but in the electronic version, it isn't.

But that is the tetragrammaton, the name of the covenant God of Israel, Yahweh, which we slaughter in English as Jehovah, that it could not have been pronounced as Jehovah, but Yahweh is the best pronunciation.

He who sacrifices to any God other than to Yahweh alone shall be utterly destroyed.

And you shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you are strangers in the land of Egypt.

You shall not afflict any widow or orphan. If you afflict him at all, and if he does cry out to me,

I will surely hear his cry, and my anger will be kindled, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows, and your children fatherless.

So notice there are two groups. You have the stranger, and you have the widow, and the orphan.

And there shall be no oppression of either of these, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

But please notice the sentence immediately before. He who sacrifices to any

God other than to Yahweh alone shall be utterly destroyed. There was no freedom of religion in Israel.

There was no pluralism in Israel. You were not allowed to just worship any old

God in Israel. You could not set up your altar in Israel to sacrifice to the

Baals. Did they? Yes, and God did what? Brought judgment against them for allowing that to happen.

But the law, which is what we're reading here, the law specifically says no worship of foreign gods amongst the people of God.

And here you've got a PhD in something looking for something in the

Old Testament text. Have you noticed when you listen to folks that we used to listen to and you know 10 -15 years ago they'd be in conferences and they they could do a pretty decent job in handling a text of scripture.

And now when they start trying to find something to preach wokeism from, it is the farthest reach.

It just leaves you going, really? You think that's what that's about? That's astonishing.

Well, here you have somebody saying these were worshipers of other gods. Well, not in Israel they weren't.

They may have been strangers, but they weren't allowed to worship those other gods in Israel. That was the whole problem.

That was the whole issue of drawing people in to syncretism, which becomes the key means by which

Israel is drawn away in the worship of the gods and eventually leads to her destruction.

So it is amazing to see the depth of the filter, the lens that is to be found in this kind of stuff.

I guess I'll go ahead and say, I'm not going to play this out of...

That's not what I was looking for. There we go. I'm not going to play this up on the screen so we don't have to worry about that.

No, I didn't want you to do that. I am continuing my process of sanctification in having to go back to the stick and the rock age of something called

Windows. I have a beautiful MacBook Pro and it's intuitive and it's functional and now

I'm using Windows again. It is a sanctifying moment in my life.

It truly is. An article, not an article, but a video came out of Tim Keller speaking recently and it's hard not to listen to it basically saying, we have brought this on ourselves.

We're talking, of course, about the necessary battle that exists between a secular worldview and a

Christian worldview and the necessity upon the part of the secular worldview to banish, to establish complete totalitarianism.

You must control the thoughts from the children on up to establish this secular utopia where the elites live lives of luxury while the rest of us slave away and are supposed to be happy with a few crumbs they toss into our bank accounts once in a while.

So there is this fundamental clash that has to exist between Christ and Caesar.

Both are making ultimate claims but only one can rise from the dead. Well, it doesn't seem to be how

Tim Keller observes things and views things and so there was this amazing portion of an interview that we'll listen to here and make a few comments as it as it goes along as best

I can here if I can get this to work. So let's, we're only gonna be doing the let go audio so don't worry about the video.

I would say for the last 20 years the Christian right, though I usually would agree with their positions,

I'm pro -life. Okay, let me stop right there. I am so tired personally of hearing the evangelical elites using the the phrase pro -life as if that somehow means that we can we can give in on everything else that this secular jihad is demanding of us.

But hey, I'm still pro -life. Well, if you're pro -life then you need to be pro all of that worldview that is the basis of pro -life.

And you can't be voting in the people who will enshrine the murder of the unborn and the destruction of the born through the profanation of marriage, through the profaning of gender.

You can't keep putting those people in positions of power. So it's one thing to say well

I'm pro -life. Well, that just simply means that you that may that may mean as little as I don't think abortion is a wise birth control method.

If you think that's pro -life you've missed what the whole issue is. You don't get it.

So we continue. In other words, I still don't think that same -sex marriage is a good idea for the country or people.

I don't think same -sex marriage is a good idea.

Now maybe again this comes from living in New York City and Washington DC and constantly trying to parse all your words.

I don't understand this. How can you say that I don't think homosexual marriage is a good idea?

You know that's like it's just so lacking in depth and meaning and strength.

No, it's not just a bad idea. It's the profaning of marriage.

It is an abomination in God's sight. I really have to wonder if if the world hears us saying

I'm not so sure that's a really good idea. Maybe that communicates the idea that you know but I might change my mind.

It's not really all that big a deal. No, it's absolutely destructive. So I would technically be in you know agreeing with them but you know how they raise their money for 20 years.

They send people to letters talking about how you've got to send this money because the gay people are going to try to come and take your children away and because they're evil.

So we look at what is happening in California right now.

We look at what is being forced down children's throats in the public education system in states like California, Oregon, Washington, Massachusetts.

You know the left and right coasts and that's exactly what they're doing.

They have come for your children. They are demanding your children.

They will eventually come after homeschooling. It's just a matter of time and they are demanding the celebration on the part of your children of homosexuality, transgenderism, the entire

LGBTQ plus and now in full fulfillment of whatever he's talking about for 20 years.

We can look at the massive increase since 2015 in the number of young girls seeking testosterone therapy.

In Victoria, in Australia, in Victoria they are now allowing minor children to begin to have testosterone replacement,

Lupron, the horrifically destructive drug that delays the onset of puberty without parental consent or even informing them.

I think that's what he was just talking about and saying but that's how they're raising money. You mean they were warning about what's actually happening and that's a bad thing?

I guess that's what's being said. I don't know. It's hard to follow. And because Democrats and the left are going to destroy your religious liberty, they just said awful things.

Awful things? They're going to destroy religious liberty? Do you know what the Equality Act is about? Do you know what the

Equality Act will do? It sounds to me as if what he's saying, all these awful things, that's what's happening right now.

It was almost prophetic. And so maybe they were sounding the right warning?

So what's wrong with that again? I'm not really sure unless it's, you know, well we live in New York and so we can't we can't do those things.

And vilify people is one of the reasons why so many gay activists now just don't want to forgive evangelicals because when...

Okay, so if you speak the truth about motivations, what they're trying to accomplish, what we've said on this program since at least over 20 years that homosexuals do not want equal rights, they want uber rights.

We started saying that a long time ago and that has been completely fulfilled.

If you can look at what's happening right now, if you can look at the

Biden regime, if you can look at Kamala Harris, if you can look at the Democratic leadership, if you can look at the

Equality Act and not see that everything that we warned about is coming true right in front of your face, when are you going to see it?

How much clearer does it have to be? Everybody, non -Christians are going, if the

Equality Act passes, this nation is fundamentally changed. Away from its foundations.

So you're saying that people shouldn't have been warning about that? It better be said the warnings weren't loud enough and they were not foundational enough.

If we failed, we failed because we tried to sound the warning while still maintaining some kind of friendship with the culture, while still hoping against hope that the good old

American way would never allow what the

Equality Act's demanding, would never allow what just happened in Cambridge with polyamory, would never allow the

Obergefell decision. That was our failure.

To not call the culture, maybe it was out of, well let's just be honest, it was the myth of neutrality.

I mentioned this somewhere recently and someone said, how

Bonsinian of you? Well, I think it's

Pauline, I think it's Jesus, but yes, the myth of neutrality is undoubtedly one of the greatest sins that the church has committed that muted and weakened the warning of what was coming.

So it was, oh this stuff is really bad, don't go there, wasn't joined with the only true path of peace, the only true way of human flourishing is submission to the

Lordship of Christ because many of us bought the idea that that's out there and we're all safe in here and that's that kingdom there and this is this kingdom here and the two don't have anything to do with each other and so we gave them, we let them remain autonomous and believe in the myth of neutrality while we also believe in the myth of neutrality.

There is no such thing, doesn't exist. You're either under the Lordship of Christ or you're rebelling against it.

There is no neutrality, there's no neutrality because he's the creator of all things, that's epistemologically speaking, it's true in culture as well.

So it's terrible, they'll never forgive us, I'm not asking for their forgiveness, they need to be asking

God for his. Why should I be asking for forgiveness for speaking honestly?

I mean we are really getting to the point where evangelical elites are telling us that, well look at the

Lucado situation. I'm so sorry that six, seven years ago, or was it 2004, so a little bit longer than that,

I forget when it was. When was it? Yeah, I preached a sermon based on the

Word of God. I mean every minister and us especially absolutely demand that if we're going to even be allowed to continue to breathe air, we are going to have to apologize for ever having preached 1

Corinthians 6, 9 -11, ever having preached 1 Timothy chapter 1 and the recitation of the

Decalogue that's found there, ever having preached Romans chapter 1, and if you preached it accurately, if you preached it consistently, contextually, historically, they'll never forgive you.

Well, I'm not looking for their forgiveness because that's not doing something wrong.

The people who need to ask their forgiveness are the people that are coddling them, the people that won't tell them the truth straight up front, those are the ones that need forgiveness, but that will come in the future.

And they had a little more power in the 80s and 90s. That's how they raised their money. That's how they got people out. And weirdly enough, that's not the

Christian way at all. The Christian way at all is, you know, the way up is down.

The way to rule is to serve. This is how Jesus did it. The way to get happy is to not think about your own happiness, but the happiness of others.

Wait, what does that have to do? There's a delay, so I apologize. What does that have to do with this situation?

Those are two different things. Service of others in the church, yeah, that's how you keep the church unified.

We're talking about warning about the intentions of evil men and women. How do you conflate those?

I don't know how you conflate those things. What's the up down? What does that have to do with the propriety of saying, look, these people are working with these people, working with these people, and all of this is connected together.

And this is going to lead to the destruction of these freedoms and then those freedoms. And you and I today, you know that probably today, certainly this week, you encountered a situation where you had to stop yourself from saying or typing or writing something because you know, you already know your freedoms of expression are limited in our culture today.

And what could happen to you? You know it. You're well aware of it. Wasn't like that in the 1980s, was it?

No, it wasn't. So anyway. The way to get any influence is to empty yourself and be a servant.

That's Jesus' way. And they're not doing that. They're actually using the

Nietzschean way. And I think what that did was by for a long time just keeping evangelicals frothing at the mouth about how everything is going so bad and making everybody so angry.

By the way, things are getting bad for evangelicals. It's very possible. I am not in denial about the fact that 10 years from now, if you have evangelical convictions about sex and gender, you may not be able to work for a major university or for the government.

10 years from now? How about five years ago? Somebody hasn't caught up with what's going on.

10 years from now? I mean, there there's some wide -eyed optimism there.

That's already the situation. That's already the situation.

That's where we are. So yeah, that's okay. We're soft -selling it, but all right.

Or for a big corporation. And it's not that Christians haven't faced that other places in the past.

We shouldn't be crybabies. Nevertheless, having said all that... We shouldn't be crybabies.

Well, if what you mean is we should recognize God's judgment upon a sinful society and that Christians experience that judgment along with the society around them, well, okay.

I'm not talking about that. What we are talking about is what message do we bring to the persecutors of Christians?

What message was brought to the persecutors of Christians in the past? You will someday stand before the one you're persecuting.

Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting them? No, me. And so that was the message.

Judgment will come upon you. You will be judged for this. I'm not hearing that here. I'm hearing we all need to get along and we've just been so mean -spirited and all the mean tweets and stuff like that,

I guess, is what's behind all this. I don't know. Yeah, we nurtured this and Christian nationalists used that and therefore we brought it on ourselves.

Even though I agree with Perry and Right Head that in many ways the Christian nationalists are kind of using us.

Evangelicals are not all Christian nationalists, but they are using us. They're recruiting very well because we made a lot of our people recruitable.

Yeah, Tim. Okay, I don't, I have no earthly idea. I still do not have any earthly idea.

When the first time I saw something about quote -unquote Christian nationalism was,

I just don't remember. Evidently the idea is if you say the only hope for a nation is

Christ, that makes you a Christian nationalist. Or if you in any way say that it is better to have nations than to have globalism.

It is better to have local government that is responsive to the people and lives amongst the people than it is to have somebody in a city in Europe run your town and everything else.

Localism, okay, is that nationalism? Is it a recognition that the

Bible says that God establishes borders and nations and peoples and judges nations and peoples and raises up kings?

And is that this Christian nationalism thing? I don't know. I don't know.

I personally do not, well I might know in an extended way two or three people who had a quasi -religious attachment to Donald Trump.

But not any serious Christians I know of. They all recognized his many flaws and the many problems that were there.

But they also recognized that the other options were far worse on a worldview level.

But there is Tim Keller saying, you all, you brought this on yourselves.

You brought this on yourselves. I'm not even certain how that functions. I'm not even certain how that works.

You brought this on yourselves. Okay, I actually should have done this with the preceding, but it all fits together.

Y 'all remember about, what was it, two or three weeks ago or so now? That's good stuff.

We got one of those fizzy water machines down here and I'm just, I'm on cloud nine. Remember about two or three weeks ago, there was supposed to be a discussion between Neil Shenvey and Dr.

William James Jennings. And the Veritas Forum was going to be doing this.

And Neil Shenvey, I believe, is a mathematician, if I recall correctly. A PhD.

I believe that the brother has a brain tumor, as I recall, and is fighting something along those lines. So that's always something to keep in your prayers.

But Neil has written a lot on the subject of critical race theory. Not everyone agrees with everything that he says about it.

That's not the issue. The issue here was there is supposed to be a back and forth between a

Yale scholar who is a black Baptist. Now this demonstrates once again, remember, the new senator from Georgia is a black

Baptist. So Baptist, in this situation, communicates nothing.

It communicates absolutely, positively nothing.

As far as actual worldview, theology, nothing.

It doesn't mean anything. It talks about how you get baptized, what that might mean, who

God is, anything else. All up for grabs. Well, the Veritas Forum canceled it because they claimed that it was an unequal pairing of scholars.

That Jennings is just so greatly skilled and trained in this field and Shenvey's not.

And so we can't let that happen. Well, there's a lot of things to be said about that.

But I forget who it was. Someone, I apologize, someone on here's

Willie James Jennings, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale and so on and so forth.

Someone was kind enough to post a section on Twitter from his book on the subject, it's a commentary on the book of Acts.

Now you would think that a commentary on the book of Acts would be a fairly innocuous thing.

I don't put that up yet. Unfortunately, again, I'm dealing with Windows and I'm fighting it and it doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

And you would think that this would be pretty simple, that there really wouldn't be a whole lot to go for.

I put a bookmark in and it doesn't go to bookmarks and da da da da da da da.

Let me see what that does. Notes. Ah, maybe that'll do it. Go there, please.

Double click. Double click. Go. Please. Yes. I don't know how

Microsoft's still in business. I don't know. I don't know. Anyways, you would think this would be a, you know,

I mean, how wild can you get in writing a commentary on Acts, right? Well, okay. I guess

I could think of some ways. This is the good doctor's commentary.

Now, I, this is in the section on the death of Ananias and Sapphira.

Remember the story? They hold back part of the price of the land.

They lie to the Holy Spirit and God judges them and they are struck dead.

And of course, the church fears because obviously this is the

Holy God amongst the people, just as it had happened amongst the people of Israel of old. That's not what

Dr. Jennings gets from this story. I'm just going to read this to you and I'll let you,

I've, how many times have I said in this program that one of the most dangerous places you can go is a

Christian bookstore? That made much more sense back when there were Christian bookstores. Not too many of them left.

And I've tried to warn people, a lot of young Christians will go into a place like that or they'll go on to Amazon or whatever is left that you can buy books from.

And you just assume if someone's going to write a commentary on a book of the Bible, they actually believe it. And you end up getting it and you end up with tremendous confusion as to why people are saying what they're saying.

I've had to read so many of these commentaries over the years. I went to Fuller Theological Seminary and I had to read commentaries and I had to report on commentaries.

And so as a fairly young person, I got exposed to a lot of this stuff.

So this is not overly unusual, but it is very representative of what is being taught in seminaries today, which is why there are precious few seminaries that I could recommend to people at all any longer.

I'm just gonna start reading. Get a deep seat in the saddle, as they say. Jesus sees the power of coupling and drawn it toward his own life.

I don't think that's probably big enough. I don't, I'm not sure. I don't, I just, I don't think the text is large enough and I can't get any bigger.

Now a marriage of disciples, any disciples will witness the church and her lover, Jesus Christ. Yet this witness is not reversible.

The church and its lover do not yield their spotlight, their center of attention to the couple, because in the light of this true love is found the love of God for the creation and for the creature.

The witness of the love of God for all creation and creatures is always at risk in the attention stealing reality of modern coupling.

Too many churches have yielded the spotlight to the couple and have weakened local church life as a site of loving and belonging and turn those who are not coupled or married into resident aliens inside the church.

They have turned them into a strange non -creature of God, a single. The question we must ask is whether singleness as a state of being makes any theological sense.

It does not. All disciples of Jesus are caught up in a life of unfolding intimacy with the triune

God and with each other. This is the coupling that makes intelligible our coupling where two seek to be one with each other as disciples joined in a shared journey with others.

Coupling in this regard is a wonder to be shared by all who wish it, whether heterosexual or homosexual and marriage should be grasped by all who would mark their life together as a life inside the way of disciples.

Yet we must end the burden placed on couples to be the container of all intimate life and the heresy that the couple is the only safe and sanctioned place where the honesty, safety and joy of being vulnerable creatures may be touched and celebrated.

That heresy has allowed the couple to bend the life of the church toward itself, enfolding ecclesial existence in its wishes and dreams and defining the quality of life by its own lights.

So aren't you glad you didn't have to go to seminary and spend your life reading this kind of stuff? The church continues to struggle over whom may be married as well as how to claim a vision of intimacy for our common life.

Our obsession with coupling has served as a way to avoid the ecclesial work of forming intimate community and it has drained the church of the deep riches of its own erotic and intimate life born at a table where the body and blood of Jesus calls us continually to partake.

God says to us here and now, please take touch and handle my body. I offer it all to you, every cell, all my flesh and blood, please eat and drink my very life.

For too many people intimacy means only sexual intercourse and their bodies are rendered in this vision of intimacy into dumb machines activated only by and through narratives of sexual consumption.

Such a narrowed understanding of intimacy, remember this is a commentary on Acts, such a narrowed understanding of intimacy has clothed our bodies in relentless anxiety over its desires and forced us to equate our longings and hungers with the sinful condition of the human creature.

For those who long for a home beyond feverish coupling or the anxiety over their desires as well as for those whose sexual identity does not rest easy with a stable orientation, there remains a call of discipleship not away from intimacy but toward it.

Not in concealment of hungers and longings but in their full and complete exposure into a God who not only receives us without shame but also celebrates our life in all its complexities.

May I just stop and point out if you don't see it the last few sentences were directly what I was talking about in regards to empathy then you weren't listening because that's what he's calling for.

See their experience has to be validated, you have to enter into it. That's what I was talking about. I can't force you to catch it,

I can't but I can try and I did. The church should be the intimate reality of a disciple's life.

From its depth of closeness comes the logic of joined disciples, those who have chosen to live together in a bond of marriage that echoes the communal life of faith.

Only as churches begin to grasp their space as safe and erotic space may the bloated expectations and idolatrous intimations of coupling be taken off the backs of would -be couples.

I'm going to stop. If you don't get what he's attacking here, he's attacking the emphasis upon the

God -ordained institution of one man one woman in marriage. The foundation of the family.

Patriarchy, didn't use the phrase here. Churches should draw on the rich reservoir of Christian contemplation and mysticism to articulate a sensuous language of life in the spirit that receives the body's passions as gifts of grace and not obstacles of faith.

Unfortunately because of our ecclesial failure in this regard, we constantly ask couples to create what they cannot.

A space of safety and freedom. No couple can create only what God gives.

A couple can be a space of safety and freedom only as it participates in a space of safety and freedom for a gathering community.

Only in a space of shared intimate life may a couple be spared from its own idolatry and its use as a destructive power.

Yes, this is a commentary on Acts. This is what passes for scholarship at Yale.

This is why no Christian should ever spend a dime sending your offspring to places like Yale.

There is no reason to any longer. There was long ago. There is none now. The couple has become one of the greatest tools to sustaining the realities, here we go, of oppression, economic injustice, racism, sexism, and sexual violence by becoming a citadel of ultimate concern for people.

The life and well -being of a couple and their children easily command our greatest loyalties and constantly draw us towards supporting policies of governments and the practices of corporations that destroy life and are harming the planet.

Let me just stop there. Do you hear what he's saying? Because we are focused on a father and a mother and the children and the family unit, you're destroying the planet.

The actions, oh let's get back to Acts here. The actions of Ananias and Sapphira in withholding part of their resources is precisely the gesture that seems sensible but opens them to falsehood and resistance to the

Spirit of God because they were a couple, you see. The gesture of withholding connects easily onto our current condition where couples are invited and invite us to selfishness.

Not all couples are equal and those with resources and influence in this world are tempted to collapse their energy into enabling, supporting, protecting, enhancing what they have and standing idly by enjoying economic, social, and political structures that benefit their life together and drain the life out of others.

You see, if we were really fancy you'd be having like a Che Guevara image going back behind me right now.

Maybe some hammers and sickles floating by. That would be how to get everybody's attention because that's what this is.

The church in this world will speak more powerfully and act more clearly for the sake of the gospel and the reign of Jesus if it can overcome its worship of the couple and finally and completely make them disciples.

Christians who couple should allow their coupling to be a witness of discipleship not by how they display an obsessive commitment to each other and their offspring but how they help a community enter into a greater reality of vulnerability sharing an intimate life.

Who was it that says it takes a village to raise a child? Every Christian couple should become iconoclasts of the couple.

Helping to break all the idols of a community that constantly hold up the couple as the center of its missional activity, its entertainment, and its joy.

There is joy in coupling that should be celebrated and shared by all who wish life together especially for gay sisters and brothers whose lives of love are yet to receive the celebratory embrace by the church that they greatly deserve.

Even among churches that affirm homosexual marriage the sound and songs of celebration ring much too quietly and sometimes not at all.

A marriage folded into discipleship always becomes more and more than the world imagines, more than the state envisions, and more than those so joined understand.

It is two who have allowed the desire of God to flow through them on all sides like a light shining uncontrollably into formerly shadowed places.

This is why calling gay marriage a civil union is a denial of Christian discipleship of the two.

When disciples marry their love becomes the site of God's outrageous joy.

There in these two divine desire will be magnified beyond the two into the many. Their love intensifies

God's aim and reach into a community being gathered to know and experience God's strong embrace.

This is why gay marriage must be celebrated just as strongly, as loudly, and as intensely as any marriage of disciples because what begins in civil toleration when touched by the

Spirit of the Living God becomes joyous and extravagant celebration. I'll stop there if you don't mind.

Yeah, well but nobody can see that.

You got to let folks see what you were doing back there. You weren't listening to the rest of what

I was. There you go. Okay. All right. There you go. Yeah. There you go. We've got our commies out there.

Okay. This is, so let me let me say Veritas Forum was right on one thing.

There was a mixed match but it was the opposite direction than they thought.

I don't care that that man teaches at Yale. That is a perversion of God's Word. That is a word salad pretending to be scholarship.

That is just simply neo -marxism parading around in religious language and I for one will not respect that.

That has nothing to do with Ananias and Sapphira. That's not commenting on the on the on the text of inspired scripture and to pretend that it is, we'll receive the just wrath of God in the future.

Oh you can't say that. Why can't I? Well we'll turn you off.

Yeah you probably will. Doesn't change the truthfulness of it. Doesn't change the truthfulness of it.

That's not what Luke was talking about. That's not what Luke believed. That's not what Paul believed. That's not what the Apostles believed. That's not what they taught.

It's a perversion of the faith. Period. End of discussion. And if you have already been so compromised that you're sitting there going, but I'm sure he's a nice man, then you've missed the whole nature of truth.

I'm sure Arius was a nice man too. But what he taught destroyed lives and destroyed the truth.

So there you go. Amazing stuff. Amazing stuff indeed. Let me see here.

Oh you want, okay yeah. Where understanding this is

Ellen Page. Now Elliot Page. Yet another formerly beautiful, were able to get that up, formerly beautiful woman.

Now pretending to be a man. I'm fully who

I am. What does that mean? I'm fully who I am.

That's human autonomy. That is rebellion. That is joined together with our cultures granting to man.

Here's what's happening. Here's what's happening when you join together this entire worldview that is intent upon destroying all the foundations that Christianity provided with scientism and human autonomy.

And you end up with this. Destruction of life. And we are supposed to celebrate it.

I will not celebrate it. I cannot celebrate it. You cannot do so either if you are a

Christian. Now. Hello my friends.

Don't bring that up yet. There we go. Again I'm fighting with Microsoft.

Like I said basic functional things in iOS are advanced functional things in in Microsoft.

So it it takes a little work and I'm working on it here. We mentioned the fact that we are going to be responding to Trent Horn and Catholic Answers and a presentation that Trent did on the subject of the distortion of the early fathers by Protestants.

So we did one and that was a long program. I think we almost went two hours on that one if I recall correctly.

Going through Augustine and interestingly enough again and I made this very very clear.

I gave Trent props. Trent's a nice guy. I think Trent and I can do good debates together because we're not you know.

There are Protestant apologists and Catholic apologists who are like oil and water and putting them together in the same room is probably not wise.

Trent and I can get along. We can have spirited strong debate. And so I mentioned very plainly told everybody look this was an example

Trent gave of a phrase that Catholics shouldn't be using.

Rome has spoken the case is closed. Roma lacuta est, casa finita est.

Which as I point out Augustine not only never said but the entire context of that was in the context of demonstrating that the church in North Africa stood firmly against Pope Zosimus who claimed

I have fully examined this Pelagius and Celestius they're they're fine that I restore them and the church in North Africa said no.

And eventually once the civil authority got involved and we can theorize as to how that is.

He did a full turnaround. There have been many times the Bishop of Rome has said this.

Okay later on not this. Honorius, Liberius the council during after the

Council of Nicaea and who knows what we may see right now.

Hey I mentioned yesterday on the program Rome puts out a statement can't bless same -sex marriages.

Don Lemon. Was that good? Lemon. Don Lemon.

Don Lemon as they say down in Alabama. Don Lemon. Lemon. If you want to do the

French version or something has informed us all that God does not judge which makes every single writer of the

Bible a liar but you Don Lemon 40 authors 1 ,500 years yeah okay anyway.

But whether that's gonna stay that way the whole point is you have a

Pope who can change these things. Now there'd be Roman Catholics say no it's impossible can't be done. Well we'll see but for now

I was thankful that that was that was said.

Anyway so what we want to do is we want to work through this presentation over time and provide a response because it's interesting here at the beginning he mentions something

I've talked about multiple times in the past and that was that when Catholic Answers first began they didn't debate anyone who challenged them on dearly church fathers and on patristics and things like that.

They debated Calvary Chapel folks who Calvary Chapel has no real connection to church history as far as studying of it and things like that and it was at the

City of the Lord in Tempe Arizona in early December of 1990 that Catholic Answers for the first time got hit with more patristic citations on the

Protestant side than appeared on the Roman Catholic side. So much so that I am sure that they heard all about it because there were

Catholics getting up and walking out of that debate and slamming doors in a Catholic Church.

Well City of the Lord it wasn't wasn't in the church it was a Catholic institution whatever.

They were not happy and so that started with us.

We were the ones that did that. I had hair back then and big glasses and things like that so it was a long time ago.

So I want to listen to Start and Stop, Respond, I have recreated

Trent's PowerPoint presentation. It didn't take very long actually to do so but I've got that together and we are going to take a look at what he has to say.

We won't be able to get overly far today I've already gone an hour but at least get into the introductory stuff and let's let's do it.

This conference we're talking about the early church fathers saying the early church was the Catholic Church.

I remember reading a Protestant scholar an article he wrote a few years ago and he said that the most arrogant thing he thought that a

Catholic had ever said and it was not that our pancake breakfasts are better than their potlucks hand down.

He said the most arrogant thing was to be deep in history is to cease to be

Protestant. Of course from Cardinal John Henry Newman it's a great quote. It's a great quote yeah and let me just remind everybody

John Henry Cardinal Newman was a brilliant mind.

If you read the Infallibility of the Church by George Salmon a contemporaneous work by another brilliant mind you will see that the men of his age respected him and respected his intelligence and his his study.

So do not underestimate John Henry Cardinal Newman but also do not forget his history because in my opinion

Newman was a tragic figure. He was tragic in the sense that as I said last time he well knew that what was proclaimed by the

Vatican Council and regarding the infallibility of the Bishop of Rome was not the belief of the early church.

It was not apostolic. It was simply not commensurate with the history of the church and he had written against the concept.

Once it became the official statement of the church he submitted himself and this was one of a number of reasons why he developed what's called the development of doctrine concept.

The idea that dogma and doctrine is contained in seed form and then grows into something much larger and as Salmon points out repeatedly in the

Infallibility of the Church which I'd highly recommend you get a hold of.

I would assume about the only way to get hold of it today is in PDF format but I highly recommend it to you.

What Salmon pointed out in the Infallibility of the Church is that this was a fundamental abandonment of the historical field of battle.

It was not where Rome had been before. It was not where the Jesuits had been in the counter -reformation.

This represented a new form of approach where you in essence conceded that the now extremely developed concepts of the papacy,

Marian theology, these types of things were not primitive because they weren't.

The people who desperately, I mean the term is desperation, latch on to any phrase, any word in the most flowery language and fill it with Marian dogma to go see here's something in the fourth century.

That means that it was there. No it doesn't mean it was there. No serious historian operates in that way but Roman Catholics have to because they can't do serious history on their dogmas because their dogmas were defined by the assertion such as you have in Satus Cognitum that this is the universal faith of the church.

This is always what has been taught from the beginning. The ancient and universal faith.

So what was truly sad and tragic about Newman was that he used that great intellect to then destroy the field that he had made the claim about.

To go deep into history is to cease defending history is what he ended up having to defend.

And so yes it is arrogant and it is improper and you've never heard me say to go deep into history is to be a

Reformed Baptist or to cease to be this that or the other thing because the early church had a lot of different perspectives not on certain issues.

There you know there wasn't it there wasn't a bunch of people running around that were denying monotheism or something like that but there were a number of different perspectives and there were differences even between some of the

Cappadocian fathers for example. You can detect some differences of emphasis and things like that so you have to let the early fathers be the early fathers.

Rome dogmatically does not allow her people to do that. So it is an arrogant thing what he said but there's a background to it that that makes it more so and maybe that's what this guy was referring to.

But I think for our conference so when you look at the history of the church Catholicism fully blooms.

Now he took great chagrin at this because this particular scholar was a Protestant church historian and so you may encounter

Protestant friends maybe have some Protestants here I hope that we do who may think that it's arrogant to say oh if you just read the church fathers you'll automatically become

Catholic. What about and there are very good Protestant church historians I cite several of them in my own works.

Yaroslav Pelikan he was Lutheran became Eastern Orthodox. J .N .D. Kelly who was a great Anglican scholar.

Lots of them. So if you're so confident that the early church fathers are Catholic why haven't these people converted and what now catch that and this is this is very important.

Here are a couple of people that were mentioned there. I didn't grab my Pelikan set but J .N

.D. Kelly early Christian doctrines by by J .N .D. Kelly that is very useful.

The Oxford Dictionary of Popes but also by J .N .D. Kelly really interesting stuff there.

Obviously Roman Catholics would have to take exception to a number of the things that he says for the obvious reason that it's about the

Popes and therefore errors that Popes made and things like that. He didn't mention this one Peter Lampe's work

Christians at Rome in the first two centuries I think is really fascinating because this is in comparison to most things 2003.

I mean for some people that sounds like a long time ago. It's not. But what's really important about that particular work is the information that it provides us on the subject of the form of church governance in Rome early on which was very plainly from Ignatius's letters and from other sources not a monarchical

Episcopate. There was no one bishop in Rome it was a plurality of elders and that of course causes tremendous problems with the

Petrine promise and and the claims of Rome in regards to the passing on of Petrine authority and and all the rest that kind of stuff.

But yes the thing that I really found objectionable to what Trent Horn said is it's not a matter of well why didn't they convert?

Why didn't they convert? That's that's not the point. There are going to be people from all.

Well okay let me back up. He's talking to people who are assuming that if you study church history you will automatically convert.

And now he's trying to explain why that's not the case. And I just simply say it's not the case because that's not what conversion is based on.

God can use all sorts of things. He can use the consistency of the history of the church. He can use you know many things.

But that's not what brings about conversion. And when you listen to EWTN, when you listen to a lot of what

Catholic Answers does, one of the things that strikes you is when we talk about conversion we are automatically always talking about conversion to Christ.

Most of the time they're talking about conversion to the church. Now they would say well well well that's not a big difference you know

Christ is associated with the church blah blah blah blah. There is a fundamental difference because we are talking about regeneration.

We are talking about a spiritual thing. And they're talking about submitting to a to the magisterium and to the church and seeing in the church the fulfillment of all these things.

That is a difference between us. I would say is that when people look at the church fathers there are

Protestants who look at them and then of course see things in a different way and misinterpret what they say or make an error in their thinking.

That's what I want to point out in this talk today. And Protestants have been stepping up their game. Now notice notice for Trent there is only there is only one way of interpreting the early church fathers.

Did you catch that? They make mistakes and they miss this and da da da da da. So so there is there is no other way to interpret the early church fathers than what

Rome says. Well that's that's Rome's claim. He's accepting sadist cognate to him. He said yeah that's that's the case.

That wasn't in some areas what Loftin was saying yesterday when we played that section from the debate he did with Chris Day.

So I'm not sure if there's if that's just a tactical difference or just what. In this regard if you watch listen to debates between Carl Keating and Patrick Madrid in the late 1980s the early 1990s you'll hear people getting smashed.

They don't even bother touching the church fathers and Protestants saw a need to do that. So in the late 90s early 2000s you see more works coming that try to analyze the fathers from a

Protestant perspective. So what I want to offer now it sounds like we're talking about the same thing and in a sense we are.

The first debates that I listened to were with Carl Keating Patrick Madrid Jerry Madetix and Scott Hahn.

Okay they were the the big late 90s big 1989 stars.

Okay and I think it was 89 might have been 88 but I'm probably 1989 when

I started first listening to these particular debates. I can assure you that Kelly was active well before then and there were already obviously and I don't know

I have not found Roman Catholic apologists as a whole to be all that familiar with scholarly

Protestant or reformed writings from the time of the Reformation and things like that and so they may not be familiar with Salmon they may not be familiar with Whitaker they might be familiar with good they may not be familiar with the

Lutheran Chemnitz. These are massive works multi -volume works thousands of pages dealing with the early church and and patristic sources and things like that and so we weren't there was there was no it wasn't like all the

Protestants got together and said we need to start doing something about this. No I became involved in dealing with Roman Catholicism partly because of online activity.

Yes there was an online before the internet it was called Fido net it was called the

BBS system bulletin board systems and that was active in the 1980s and I was active in witnessing to Mormons Jehovah's Witnesses and then we ran into Roman Catholics and we started having exchanges

Roman Catholics and that's when we are sent tapes no no links to go listen to something something arrived in the mail and it was a cassette tape and so I would be literally out

I remember very clearly preparing to debate Tim Staples for example on my bike with what was called a

Walkman in my back pocket on in my back jersey pocket and it was you know yay thick and that big and it's a it's a cassette tape player and when the battery started dying the person would start talking much more slowly the fun days of the ancient past anyway so I started listening and this was yeah this was right at the end of my seminary and yeah right is at 1990 that that year was first year

I taught church history at Grand Canyon so I'm studying church history and I'm preparing to teach church history and so I'm hearing claims being made that I just I know just simply don't fit with the facts and so when we did that debate on on the papacy which was moderated by Scott Hahn by the way and I think it was the beginning of the division between Han and matics at that point because when it was over Han came up to the two of us soon as it was done

I mean he dismissed it turned around he was angry just I've seen

Han angry a number of times and he said to me he rebuked me he says you brought up papal infallibility and that wasn't the subject of this debate well

I had once or twice but the vast majority of my argumentation had not been about papal infallibility but about interpretation of the

Petrine promise and things like that in the early church but then in front of me and with a crowd gathering around us he turned to Jerry matics and he said and you blew it because you used only scripture and you can't do that and with Protestants gathering around like sharks around a wounded fish

Scott Hahn turned around and stalked out of the building and left

Jerry matics standing there in the midst of all these people who knew that he had just lost this debate and now they wanted to press their advantage and Han turned around and left him standing there and I don't remember how long it was after that that it was a matter of weeks or months at most it was not a long time at all before Jerry matics was no longer with Catholic answers and it had only been 18 months earlier

I've got to find my old collection of this rock I eventually found online

I found the picture from this rock magazine publication of Catholic answers full it was either the inside front cover or inside back cover

I think is the inside front cover of this rock magazine full black -and -white picture full page glossy of Jerry matics seated on the the back of a sort of a pew and behind him as a church and the the thing was

I was the reason your friends left the

Catholic Church or something along those lines because one of the things that Jerry claimed was that he was this great anti -catholic and all the rest this kind of stuff and for years

I said Jerry I could you could you send me one debate you did as a Protestant against Roman Catholicism can you can you send me documentation about one happening any tracks you wrote booklets

I know you didn't write a book but tracks booklets anything to back up this claim that you make and he never provided anything

I'm sure he was anti -catholic as a Presbyterian he was the first to my knowledge ordained

PCA minister to ever become Roman Catholic to my knowledge so he would have been quote -unquote anti -catholic in that way but in the idea in the sense of actually engaging with Rome's apologists and things like that I to this day don't believe that ever really actually happened but that's how they're advertising it and I would say within a very short period of time after that debate at the

City of the Lord is when Jerry was no longer with Catholic answers he went out on his own and you know what

I every time I say that I I'm like how come I haven't heard anything about gerrymatics the last time honestly that I heard anything about gerrymatics you know what it was when he was on Jeopardy he was on Jeopardy about what

I don't know four or five years ago and he didn't win so that was last time

I heard anything I had a friend who would have sort of following him he'd get sporadic emails gerrymatics was the least organized and disciplined person

I've ever met I've ever met and I've told the story

I'll just tell it and we'll wrap up when he and I debated at a Presbyterian Church in Denver Colorado on the papacy over seven hours

I encourage people there's no video of it but it's on sermon audio seven hours the first night was on the

New Testament at Denver Seminary the second night Presbyterian Church on the early church and when the second night was over I had packed my stuff up I had that same silver case that I used when

I debated Mitch Pacwa I had put my books away and Rich and I were staying up on the on the platform and so there was a six -foot table over here and I've got two bookcases book bags sitting on it and that's it the chairs pushed in over on the other side is

Jerry and Jerry had been out in the selling books or something or out talking to people and he comes walking back in most people have left and Rich and I are looking at his table and so there's a you know there's a there's a six that's about a side that size table over there

I would say yeah similar the one behind me there was not an open square inch on the top of that table books opened tablets of paper just everywhere and then underneath the table on the floor the only spot that was open was where his feet had been there's there's papers and notes and bags and books total disaster total disaster now part of that was because he was really struggling in that debate

I hit him with so many citations from so many different perspectives from the early church that demonstrated this was not apostolic this was not what the early church believed at all that he was just throwing stuff out left and right and so he was having to dig deep but yeah that was that was many moons ago many many that was 1993 when we went up to Denver Colorado World Youth Day when

Pope John Paul II came so yeah we've been doing this for a long time and so he says it was early 2000s no it was it was it started the pushback started

December of 1990 that's that's when it began I know because I was there and I remember it very very very clearly so we're going to continue looking at what

Trenthorne has to say and unpacking some of the historical materials and we hope you find that to be useful what is tomorrow everybody tomorrow radio free

Geneva in the AO max studios so we're gonna have to get you you're gonna have to get the radio free

Geneva graphic for the other side over there definitely need to do that so that is tomorrow same time same station don't you dare change that dial oh

I love I love that change that dial nobody speaks like that anymore and nobody changes the dial but us old folks we we just feel much better when we talk like that so thanks for watching the program today we will