Pitfalls for the Reformed | Theocast

Hi, this is John. Today on Theocast, Justin and I, well, we kind of take shots at ourselves and our world, the conservative reformed world, and how it's all over the place at times, all over the road, falling on one side of the ditch to the other, from dead orthodoxy all the way over to revivalism and pietism.

And we're not here to just point the gun at everybody else and say, see how they're wrong, we're going to shoot them down. We're actually trying to create a conversation to where we can ask ourselves, how did we.

Get here?

What is it that God's expecting? And can we identify that maybe one of these pitfalls are in my own life and how do we correct it? So we have this conversation, we continue it into the Simple Reformanda where we talk about the purpose of the Christian life and the kingdom.

So we hope you enjoy. We're excited to announce we have a brand new podcast available called the Kingsmen Podcast. It's where we are reclaiming biblical manhood by training and equipping men for the work of the kingdom.

You can find it anywhere you download a podcast. You can also watch it on YouTube. We have new episodes that come out every Monday. Welcome to Theogast, encouraging weary pilgrims to find their soul sufficiency in Jesus Christ alone.

Conversations about your Christian life and ours from a reformed confessional and pastoral perspective. If you're wondering what's going to be going on today and that didn't make any sense, let me boil it down.

We're going to clarify the gospel and then we're going to reclaim the purpose of the kingdom and how you fit into it. Your hosts today are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

And I'm John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee. And Justin, it's been a wild morning. We've had technical difficulties, but guess what, brother, we are here.

We're thankful to the Lord that we're able to upgrade some equipment here at Theogast. And at the same time, as a person that is completely utilitarian when it comes to technology, I can find it frustrating when things don't work.

And the whole setup process can be a little, I don't know, I don't think any of us enjoy.

It.

Let's be real. I mean, even if you're a techie guy, which I'm not, I think still you're just like, why is this not working? Or man, we had it set up right and then the settings got lost or whatever it is.

And now we've got to start over and yeah, why do something once when you can do it twice? Amen.

Amen.

Yeah.

Anyways, that's not why we decided to gather this morning, but that's what our experience has been. So Justin, why don't you, we're going to go and just jump right into a couple of announcements coming your way.

We do have some new podcasts that are going to be coming your way. So stay tuned for that. I think we're working on a t-shirt contest. So stay tuned for that. So there's, there's some stuff. We might even have some education classes coming for a simple word from Monda.

Stay tuned for that. So anyways, a lot of, a lot of good stuff coming. So we're, we're excited to bring out some new stuff for 2023, but Justin pitfalls for.

The reform.

Dead Orthodoxy and the Purpose of Sound Doctrine

Oh, a little eye pokey, a little eye pokey, a little bit.

I mean, and in some senses we're trying to turn the finger in on ourselves. I mean, and you know, this is maybe a terrible turn of phrase, but we're trying to point the gun at ourselves a little bit.

Yeah.

I hope that didn't offend anyone, but anyway, yeah, we talk a lot on our show about things that pertain to evangelicalism, about things that pertain to conservative Christianity, so-called in a broad way today, I mean, our thoughts are, Hey, there are errors that reform people are prone to make.

And these errors might very well also apply to conservative Christians in general. And I trust that might become clear, but the reform tradition, while you and I clearly John would find ourselves in that tradition happily, we're thankful to be where we are.

We're thankful that the Lord has taught us these wonderful truths that primarily center on the sufficiency of Christ and what he's accomplished in God's plan of redemption. That is our salvation, right?

It's our, it's our hope, it's our life and it's our sanctification. It's all that we're thankful. And at the same time, the reform tradition is not immune to error because we're all sinners and we all are prone to make mistakes theologically and in our lives.

And so today we thought, Hey, we've done a lot of conversations, had a lot of conversations, done a lot of episodes lately on things that are concerning out there, quote unquote. Let's talk about things that we're prone to do and ways that we're prone to err.

So let's discuss some things that are at least potentially problematic in here, right? So I hope that's clear enough. And where we're going to go is this. This is not an exhaustive list, but even as we've thought back through the last several hundred years, and if you read some church history and you're aware of these categories, I think this becomes pretty plain pretty quickly.

Three errors that reformed people that do exist in the reform tradition are the following. One, dead orthodoxy. We're going to explain what that means. That's always an error, a temptation. Second, pietism.

I know we talk a lot about pietism on the show, but there is pietism within the reform tradition for sure. And then thirdly, revivalism. And again, we talk about that a good bit on our show. We'll be talking about it more in the weeks to come.

But that too is something that exists within the reform stream. Even though we would say that the reformed tradition and an ordinary means of grace understanding of the faith and of the Christian life is antithetical to pietism and revivalism, it doesn't mean that those things don't rear their heads sometimes, even amongst the reformed.

The error of dead orthodoxy, which is where we'll start, I think is perhaps the error that is most obvious to people that would look at the reform tradition. There's a reason that the frozen chosen is a turn of phrase.

Jon Moffitt. It is. Yeah, yeah. We were trying to really narrow down what it is that we wanted to bring to the table, and I'm hoping two things happen. It's going to resonate with some of you saying, yeah, I thought I've seen this as well.

And we might be hitting some of you on the nose, which is kind of the point of the podcast as well, kind of saying, hey, this is probably you. You know, you might need to think about this.

Jon Moffitt Yeah, as Votie Bauckham is made famous, if you can't say amen, say ouch, right?

So, there you go. Justin Perdue. There you go. Not to promote everything he says, but I agree with that one.

Jon Moffitt. No, I mean, many people have heard that.

Justin Perdue. I know.

These days, you got to protect yourself because who knows who's going to shoot at you.

Apparently, if you mention a person's name or go on a person's podcast, you're endorsing wholesale everything they've ever said, apparently. Justin Perdue. Thoughtful people know better, Jon, and we trust our listeners do too.

Jon Moffitt. So, one of the things that has frustrated me as I've grown over the years and aware of Reformed theology is that some of the accusations aren't necessarily unfounded. You do find the Reformed, especially those who have been coined in the cage stage, they go on the internet and they're so passionate about making sure that everyone is accurate in their understanding of Scripture, which I think we are called to be accurate with our handling of the Bible.

So, I'm passionate about that, but in our accuracy for truth, we actually end up ignoring the truth, which I find ironic. I've always found it interesting when people have come to me, I'll give you a good example of this, when people come to me about saying that it's a sin if a Christian doesn't read their Bible, and they're adamant about that.

If you're not daily reading your Bible, it's not that it's beneficial, but it's a sin. You're violating God's law, and yet when I present to them God's Word as, hey, this is also a sin if you don't do that, they can't see it.

Like, for instance, abandoning your church or not caring for the burdens of people in your congregation or submitting to an elder. They are so adamant about one side of a doctrine that they fall off on the other, or ignoring.

It.

Throughout the years with Theocast, I've run across people who have their thing, whether it's the charismatic movement or they're going to turn everybody into a Calvinist. So, they get narrow-minded and narrowly focused in on a particular situation.

Brother, may I say burning down lordship salvation?

Jon Moffitt Yeah. Lordship salvation, covenant theology.

Justin Perdue. You have your thing.

Jon Moffitt. That's right. Whether you're a paedo or credo Baptist, you're going to take down the other side, and you become so narrowly focused. I understand how this can happen because there are times that I too have to study and Justin has to study.

We have to narrow down our thoughts, things that I've done in the past. Even the stuff I'm doing right now, I'm studying some stuff on theonomy and Christian nationalism and the use of the Old Testament and the New Testament.

What happens is you can get so narrowly focused in on that, that you forget the broader perspective of the Christian faith, and you forget what the point of sound doctrine is for. When we say dead orthodoxy, it's because typically what happens is we noodle down into one area and forget the whole, and because we forget the whole, which is supposed to guide and direct us and keep us clear on the purpose of the Christian life, at least we got this area locked down and it's good to go.

Justin Perdue. You proved lordship salvation was wrong, but you killed everybody's faith in the process.

Justin Perdue. Right. It's effectively dead orthodoxy. I'm going to try to explain what I mean. On the one hand, can we care too much about sound doctrine? No, but can we be off in our perspective in the way we approach it?

Yes, and I think that's what we're trying to point out here. It is a hyper focus on sound doctrine as though sound doctrine is an end in and of itself. This has been an error that Reformed people have been prone to make, and we're going to talk about this probably in a minute.

Pietism, in part, is a response to dead orthodoxy historically. We're all reactionary creatures as human beings, and that's something that we want to try to get across today. Don't be naive into thinking that you are the unicorn out there that is not reactionary in how you do theology, because we all are.

Typically, we're swinging one way or the other on the pendulum. We're rarely just resting in the middle, holding everything in appropriate tension. We're just not good at doing that. Having said that, I agree with your observation that you do see a lot of people, especially those who are newer to Reformed theology, or I would say people who have been in it for a long time, who have been shot at for years, or who have observed a lot of carnage and wreckage out there for years.

I think people of those two stripes and, of course, others are prone to fall into this orthodoxy police trap, where we're just watchdogs for sound doctrine. We're going to stand on the wall, and we're just going to be examining everybody's doctrine.

We're going to be on Christian social media, just waiting to pounce on the next error that we find, and we're going to mow it down. That's not helpful.

Justin and I are super sensitive to this. I was walking in a store yesterday, and we had a lot of suggestions thrown our way of things that people want to hear our opinion on. Justin and I are kind of like, I don't know if Theocast has to give their opinion on everything that's out there.

It's not necessarily our role to do that.

Justin Perdue. Right. I think we can acknowledge it. As the platform has grown, people reach out to us more about stuff. People want to know what we think, what our take is on ABCD that's happening in Christendom, if Christendom is even a thing.

I'm using that now. I feel like I need to explain myself. But in the Christian world, I'm not interested in doing that, nor is John, because there's a lot of stuff that we haven't had time to investigate.

There are things that we can say that might be generally true, but we're not trying to create a platform here where we react to and respond to everything that goes on, and we are now the arbiters of what's sound and right and orthodox.

And you have to think about it like you can only produce so much information. Like, here's your time of your life. Here's the time allocated to Theocast. And if I do that, is that the best use of my time?

And that's kind of what I'm getting at a little bit is that it's important. So a lot of things that we spend our time important, but how much time is that the best use of our time on the global scale of, you know, because sometimes people come up and ask me questions and then they're kind of dumbfounded.

I don't know the answer to it. And I just say, hey, look, to be frank with you on the scale of what I need to know and what I need to communicate, that's not one of them. I'm just going to be frank. It's just not that important.

And let's talk for a minute, though, unless people get the wrong idea, because people listen to our show, they know we care about sound doctrine. They know we care about sound doctrine from the Scripture, sound doctrine as we survey historical theology as well, and we're all for all of that.

Having said that, the point of sound doctrine is what? At the most primary basic level is we want to guard the gospel, the news of what Jesus Christ alone has accomplished. We never want to allow things to come in and obscure Christ.

And there are a million things clamoring to do just that. And we, because of our natural bent, we'll get into this more later too, I trust, are prone to throw all kinds of clutter on top of the gospel.

And that's happened historically. I think that's beyond debate. And so the purpose of sound doctrine is to defend the clarity of the good news. Think Paul in Galatians. It's the oldest writing of the New Testament.

That's illustrative in and of itself. The very first letter, the oldest one, written even before the evangelists write their account of the life and ministry of Christ, you have the letter to the Galatian churches, and Paul is doing what?

The man is going in the paint and throwing some bows, man, on the clarity of the good news and how we can't add anything to Christ. So we're taking our cue from that because the point of sound doctrine at its most basic level is to preserve and clarify the gospel of Jesus Christ so that sinners might be accepted before God.

They might be found righteous in His sight. They might be forgiven of their sins and absolved of their guilt because that is all of our most fundamental and basic need. And that is the purpose of the church at the most basic level is to herald this news so that people might be brought from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God's beloved Son, and sound doctrine matters to that end most pointedly.

Justin Perdue. It does. Sometimes when we think of dead orthodoxy, we think of services that are dead and are emotionless. Not necessarily. I think that sometimes dead orthodoxy could also mean that we are dead to the fruits of the Spirit, aka that which Christ even amplified for us.

When Jesus talks about speaking the truth and defending what's there, He says, speak the truth in what? A reflection of the nature of who I am. The truth, which is love. Speaking the truth in love. There are times when I'm watching YouTube videos that are sent to us, or we get tweets that are sent our way, and I'm watching this stuff, and they're accurate in what they're saying, but they're inaccurate in how they're saying it.

How can you defend Christ and not defend the actual persona of Christ, the person of Christ? You're defending this theological nuance that is really important as it relates to the Trinity, or it relates to masculinity, or whatever it is you want to put out there, but you aren't actually reflecting the living fruit that comes from that.

I've even got guys, I'll point the gun at some guys in our own church in context here, where they are theologically one of the most astute people that I know as far as being able to recite doctrine and scripture, but there's this disconnect where it's like they have the right doctrine, but when you look at their life, their life is full of all kinds of bad habits.

The way that they treat their spouse is completely inappropriate. I look at that and say, you're orthodox in your understanding of scripture, but you're a complete pagan in your practice of it. There's a complete disconnect.

I think there are a couple of thoughts. One of the things that immediately comes to my mind when you say that is, what a task we have as preachers of God's word. The thing that we're really seeking to do above all other things is to apply the gospel to the hearts and minds of our hearers.

If we're applying the gospel and we're rightly preaching the law, then the hope is that the Lord is going to use these means to keep us from this error. If you and I and others out there, if our church services, if our gatherings on the Lord's day are permeated with a right understanding of the law and the gospel, we're doing the best we can to safeguard ourselves from this kind of dead orthodoxy.

If we preach and make plain the thunder of the law and what the Lord requires of us, and how the law is good and holy and upright and just because it's a reflection of God who gave it, if we understand those things and then we start when it comes to the conversation about the gospel and justification, if we start at the judgment seat, understanding who God is and what he would require of us, and then we go from there to heralding the news of what God the Son came into the world to do and how it is that we're justified, that's affecting.

It really will. Now, we're fallen, and so we're not always stirred by things we should be stirred by, but we have a chance if we're clear on these things and the Lord is faithful to use this.

Stuff.

But then as we talk about what God has done for us and who he is and how he operates and think of the sufficiency of Christ for you, think of everything that Christ has accomplished for you and how you're now safe in him and how you struggle left and right, but Christ has you as we say these things and then as we look to the law because we're no longer threatened by it, we're no longer condemned by it, and we say, man, look at how good the and brothers and sisters, saints, let's live like this for the good of our neighbor and for the honor of our great King.

If we talk in those terms, that's going to help protect us from dead orthodoxy rather than the concern being we want to be precise in our exegesis and we want to get it right. If that's all that's in our minds, we're in grave danger, I fear.

Justin Perdue. How else do you interpret? This is why Paul says things like this. Those who are spiritual have an obligation to do with the failings of the weak. In other words, your strong theology should create within you long suffering and patience.

It should, right? It should cause you to understand that what has been faithfully passed down to you is going to take a lot of grace and patience to pass it on to someone else. But what we do is become what I call Facebook keyboard warriors and we go out there and we're going to make sure that everybody knows where they're wrong and we throw the word around everywhere.

It's just not helpful when I sit back there and think about what's going on. Justin and I are immune to this. We too have to be very careful that sometimes we can get worked up and it's like that is so bad and that is so wrong and that's so out in left field that we just want to come upside with a sledgehammer and knock it over and realize, okay, that's still a human being and that's still somebody we have to realize.

Listen, I've engaged with calling people out on the internet, but I tried to do it with as much humility and grace and patience as I possibly can because I wanted people to hear what I was saying, not how I was saying it.

He was a jerk. He was arrogant. He was so livid. That is just not helpful. We have to be careful in how we use our anger. Obviously Christ used anger to get his point across, and I think we just have to be careful in how we do that, that we can show a disturbed anger, but it's done in a loving way.

Last thought on sound doctrine here in terms of how it really does bear good fruit, and we should be concerned for these matters. The gospel rightly defended and clarified bears fruit. I'm thinking the first few chapters of Romans.

I'm thinking about Ephesians chapter 2. Paul is very clear in the early chapters of Romans that the only righteousness a sinner could ever have before God is a righteousness that God gives them. That's huge.

Then he goes to prove that point and makes it plain that all human beings, Jew and Gentile alike, are under sin. The only hope you've got, the only shot you've got, is if you're given the righteousness of Christ by faith.

Having said that, he asks then, what becomes of our boasting?

It's excluded.

By what law? A law of works or a law of faith? Of course, it's a law of faith. Then he goes on to make plain that the law is not overthrown because, of course, Christ fulfilled its requirements and endured its penalty.

But then, too, when we understand that we're not people that work to earn a wage, but we are people who trust the one who justifies the ungodly and, literally, righteousness is given to us, this produces good things in a person.

It humbles us and it also puts rock under our feet. We don't get it twisted into thinking that we're doing this. We're forced to look outside of ourselves to Christ and, to your point, it produces humility, patience, and long-suffering with others because we understand what we have received graciously from the hand of God.

This is Ephesians 2, 8 -10, that all of our salvation is a gift from the Lord. It is not of works so that no one may boast. That does good things in the heart of a human being that is naturally wired to think that we can work our way to God.

People have been doing this forever. From Babel on, from Cain on, because Cain and Abel, I don't need to get off on a tangent there, but Abel brought his sacrifice in faith. Cain did not. This is as old as time.

We need to be reminded of these matters. Lest anybody think that this kind of doctrine does not produce good works, that's absurd because, like Ephesians 2, 10, we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that God has ordained beforehand for us to walk in.

There we have it. Let's move now to the other areas that we mentioned. They're related. We're going to try to pull them apart a little bit for the purpose of this conversation. As we've even been talking about how sound doctrine produces good works when we get this right, there is a concern that often surfaces in the church because we do think we need to live better.

I agree. So do you, John. I'm thinking about my own life. I'm thinking about the congregants that make up Covenant Baptist Church. They would all say the same thing. We want to live better. We need to live better.

God help us to live better.

Amen.

That said, a lot of times through history we've seen these patterns where there is an emphasis on the clarity of doctrine. The Protestant Reformation, let's just talk the last 500 years, nothing happens in a vacuum.

The Protestant Reformation occurs. We chalk that up to the goodness and the providence of God, and we're thankful for it. There are a number of confessions of faith produced out of the era of the Reformation.

Why?

Because you're clarifying doctrine. There was a lot of error in the medieval church that needed to be clarified. That's great. But then, as we're all prone to do, we can fall off the side of the horse to major on doctrine, maybe to the neglect of how we're living.

And there's concern that begins to sprout up everywhere in the church, and you have responses to this. I think I'll go and say it. I'm going to maybe open us up to some more bullets here. Not only do you have pietism proper beginning in German Lutheranism, that's something we could talk about, but I think if you read the Puritans, all the Puritans are not created.

Equal.

Some of them are very, very good on the law and the gospel and covenant theology and sanctification and all these things. Then there are others of them that are not so great. I think some of the ones that are hyper introspective are an example of what we're about to talk about.

There's a concern for right living and ordering our lives according to the scripture. Now what happens is an opposite error from dead orthodoxy is made. One of those errors is pietism, where we are going to major on the interior of the Christian's life, affections, discipline, all of that kind of stuff.

How well are you doing? How are you performing? We're going to get into revivalism later that perhaps emphasizes transformation even more and personal fervor even more, but you can see this in the writings even right after the Reformation, where we need to be hyper introspective people and scrupulously examine every aspect of our lives.

It's to the point sometimes that it's paralyzing and the focus becomes us, not Christ.

Pietism, Revivalism, and the Emotional Life of Faith

Jon Moffitt. That's right.

Revivalism has affected the United States and really the world in ways which people don't understand. We're going to be bringing Ken Jones on to have an entire episode on this together, so stay tuned for that.

Here's the influence of it. You think about dead orthodoxy. Revivalism looked at it and said, no one's being saved. No one's really concerned about living for Christ. No one's worried about the poor. No one's worried about our cities.

People are drunk. You're over here getting your theology right and the city's going to hell. For revival, it comes in and it's got a big pop. The slogan starts to hear it. Theology divides, Christ unites.

We don't want dead orthodoxy because that's what killed Christianity in America. Revivalism is like there's something exciting about it and we don't want to put anything in its place. We don't want to put anything in the Bible in its place that would slow down this excitement for Jesus.

So it becomes vague and it becomes generalities and it's very emotionally driven. It's hard to argue when you are on an emotional high. I was a college pastor for ten years and I had kids come in my office and tell me they were convinced they were in love with whatever.

I'm like, dude, you guys are just on what's called an emotional sexual high right now that has nothing to do with love. You're experiencing endorphins and you think that's what love is, these endorphins.

We do this with Christianity where you can feel this presence and the endorphins start going and the emotions start going and you can feel that. All of a sudden, that becomes what's most important. Revivalism ends up falling off on the other side.

The Reformed are drawn to this because they can feel like there's a lack of sincerity or they just don't feel saved. Justin, I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation with people where I'm like, then you don't believe God's truth and promises and you're calling God a liar because you're saying this is what God requires of me to have assurance of my salvation.

There needs to be this radical affection that's just pumping through my veins versus God saying, no, this is how you know that you're saved. What happens is the emotional side of religion becomes the confirmation that truth is real.

So if pietism is an emphasis on discipline and performance and analyzing every aspect of how I'm doing, revivalism perhaps is an overemphasis on feeling, personal fervor, level of devotion, and then transformation of life that is inherently moral.

We're prone to make these errors because there is pietism and there is revivalism that has crept into the Reformed tradition through history. That's not debatable. We need to talk about these things lest we make similar errors.

We've made this observation before. Many American evangelicals don't know how to think about the Christian life and the Christian faith apart from some of these categories because it's so normal to us that we don't know how to think about it without this emphasis on a radical conversion moment.

You need to know when you were saved and your personal experience of the divine. We definitely value our own personal experience of God and our own feelings of God more than we.

Do.

Like you said, John, do you believe his promises?

That's right.

Do you trust what he said in his word regardless of how you might feel right now?

That's right.

Or how you might feel in an hour or tomorrow or ten years from now? Do you believe the Lord's word? I'm comforted by the fact that whenever my heart condemns me, whenever our hearts condemn us, the Lord is greater.

God is greater than our hearts. We can't trust how we feel in any given moment. Of course, it's not the best strategy to point us to our own feelings and our own fervor, something that I need to work up within me in order to legitimize my faith.

That's how people talk. There's a lot going on in our land even at the moment where people are debating the legitimacy of revival and all those things. I'm going to save comments on revivalism in general for subsequent podcasts.

I can't wait to have Ken Jones on to talk about Christ-centered preaching and to talk about revivalism. Those will be two separate podcasts.

Before we go to pietism, I have one more thought on revivalism.

We're kind of doing both because I started with pietism. You're right.

That's true because pietism gets a lot of traction in revivalism because pietism is hyper introspection. When you have guys who have the title Reformed or even Calvinistic and they get up and preach, they're preaching hyper introspection, meaning that you need to be doing this self-examination all of the time.

I've heard people say things like, I think most Christians and churches in America today aren't even Christians. That's how they preach. They're preaching to churches as if the church isn't actual believers.

The believer that's sitting in the pew is only getting first use of the law. They're just getting pounded all of the time and they're never getting the gospel after the first use of the law. The third use of the law and the first are completely smashed.

If you don't really understand what I mean by that, it's this. Revivalism and pietism was effective in saying that your obligations to the Father as a Christian is required obedience or else you're probably not a believer.

That's first and third use put together. First use is this. God requires perfect, perpetual, personal obedience to the law if you want Him to look at you and say righteous. Third use of the law says Christ is my righteousness by faith alone.

I'm in union with Him, which means all of the benefits and all of the person and all of the inheritance of Christ is mine. He and I are one in that way. So therefore, my obedience to the law now is the law guides me to help me reflect who I am now.

It's not an obligation for righteousness. It's what Paul says in Ephesians 4, walk in a way that reflects worthy, reflects who you are now. When you collapse those two in, that's a perfect example of revivalism.

It was the hellfire preaching damnation that they would come after and say, yeah, you said the sinner's prayer and you believe, but this is how you absolutely must act or else you're probably not a Christian.

You talk about creating a sense where you must get saved over and over again or a lack of assurance. Justin, I don't know how many times I got saved when I was in high school or even elementary school because I was afraid I wasn't doing enough.

I would say the sinner's prayer over and over and over again, and that is definitely the result of revivalism.

Justin Perdue. For sure.

Last comment here before we maybe speak in a more positive way to how we might press back against these errors. In revivalism, and I agree with you, pietism came first historically and then revivalism comes after, but they are very much related.

One kind of begets the other. Revivalism is always concerned with transformation at a moral level of the individual, but then often revivalism is concerned with the transformation of society through the transformation of individuals.

If you don't see that that is going on in our day, I don't know that I can say much to persuade you. Among serious-minded conservative Christians, this is a mantra that if the church is the church as it should be and people are being changed, then our land would look different.

Our country would look different. We wouldn't be in this moral dilemma that we find ourselves in. We've recorded some content on that in recent weeks, and we've taken some bullets for it, and we stand by what we said.

This is not that conversation, but it's clear that even amongst Reformed people, this temptation to think about transformation as this great end and this great aim of Christianity and that we're going to transform the world is alive and well.