September 24, 2019 Show with Hans Fiene on “An Appropriate Christian Use of Humor”

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Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming at IronSharpensIronRadio .com.

This is Chris Arnzen your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio wishing you all a happy Tuesday and this is,

I have to look up the date, I don't even remember the date. Today is Tuesday and I know it's the month of September and the actual date is the 24th of September and I am very thrilled to have on the program today somebody that I've been wanting to interview for a very long time, someone who

I think is one of the most hilarious human beings on the face of the earth and I have a feeling that a lot of you who are listening today are also fans of this individual's work and I am speaking of none other than Hans Feeney, he is the

Lutheran satire guy and he's the pastor of River of Life Lutheran Church in Shenahan, Illinois, which happens to be a congregation in the

Lutheran Church Missouri Synod and today we're going to be addressing an appropriate Christian use of humor and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Hans Feeney.

Hans are you there? Yeah I'm here, good to be here. Okay. Remember this is in television,

I can't see, I can't see you. Sorry about that. That's alright. I'm going to right away give our listeners our email address if they have any questions about our subject today, an appropriate

Christian use of humor and also if they have any questions about Lutheran satire our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com. Please as always give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA and please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

What we typically do on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Hans, when we have a very first time guest is we have them give a summary of their testimony of how they came to discover and fall in love with and follow

Jesus Christ and sometimes our listeners or should I say our guests are people who have been born and raised in a

Christian home and they can't even remember a period in their life when they were in rebellion against God or didn't believe in Jesus and so on.

But we do have those other cases, even sometimes with Lutheran pastors who perhaps were living as rebels or members of false religions and so on and then they were called by our

Lord Jesus Christ, drawn to him and finally discovered their one and only way of salvation which is

Christ and the death that he provided on Calvary for our redemption.

So if you could tell us in summary form something about your salvation testimony before we get into the subject at hand.

Well yeah, so I grew up in a Christian household, my dad was a Lutheran pastor, just recently retired from a congregation just outside of Indianapolis but I grew up in a host of congregations throughout the country.

I was born in Minnesota, lived in Utah for a while and Connecticut for a while, so and my mom's dad was a pastor, seminary professor as well, so theology and parish life is something that's very much a big part of my family and has kind of always been there.

So I remember having theological debates about, I wouldn't have known how to phrase it as the divinity of Christ at the time, but having a birthday party and having theological debates with the

Mormon kids at my birthday party about whether Jesus was God when I was maybe six years old.

Yeah, so it's been around for quite some time. Oh, I wish there was a fly in the wall for that, that sounds phenomenal.

I don't even know if that would have been the first thing in my head or anything in my head at all when

I was six years old. Other than I would used to be waiting to see what presents I got for that birthday, it wouldn't be real.

Oh yeah, there was that too, and probably arguing about which Thundercat was the best, but we also had theological debates as well.

Yeah, so the Christian faith has always been a part of my life, been there the whole time. I was baptized,

I think it was early January of 1981, so a little bit after I was born. So the

Holy Spirit has been present in my life from that moment on.

And when did you realize you were called into the pastoral ministry? I have a feeling it was when you were seven, right?

Well, yeah, I mean, you know, I'm always a little skeptical about people feeling as though they have,

I mean, I'm always sort of jealous, I suppose, of people who feel like they have a really great story about why it is that they became pastors and having some kind of profound inner calling.

I don't. In large part probably because I grew up in the ministry, so the way

I have kind of viewed it is that it's not something where you have this kind of hearty, yes

Lord, call me, choose me, send me type of thing, but where you just kind of go, all right, fine.

As a Calvinist, you kind of sound like when Farrell was guilt -tripping

John Calvin to come back to the United States. Well, yeah, I mean, there's something to it where I think it's a little bit like, you know, if you're walking across a burning building and you hear people yelling for help inside, and it's not like you really want to go into the burning building.

It's just that in that moment you go, all right, well, I've got a strong back and I can hold my breath for a while, and so on account of that I should be all right.

I should be able to do this. And so it just kind of felt like it was something I understood. It was a world

I understood well, having grown up in a household where my dad was a pastor. I knew the joys and the challenges of it, so there's been very little in the parish life that has surprised me, because it's all kind of pretty much the same stuff.

You know, you have a bit of a different rotating cast of characters, obviously, and everyone's challenges and struggles are a bit unique and different, but you kind of have the same overarching stuff.

You're there with people in the greatest moments of their lives. You're there with them in the worst moments of their lives. You receive unfathomable kindness and love from people, and you also deal with unfathomable cruelty from people as well.

So none of that has been terribly surprising to me, and so I just kind of felt like I probably knew how to preach the gospel.

It took me a while to get my handle around writing a sermon, but just in terms of knowing how to talk to people about the faith, feeling like I could stand up there and talk about it was just something

I felt like I could do. So it was never something where I felt like I had this kind of overwhelming urge drawing me to it.

I think sometimes God makes pastors by giving us a lack of a work ethic and things that we don't like.

A lot of times that's the stuff you have to have a good work ethic to kind of succeed.

If you look at the stories of very successful, driven people, they were just willing to do amazing amounts of grunt work and things that they weren't crazy about doing in order to get to where they wanted to be.

You look at that and you go, I don't have the stomach for that. I used to joke that when

I finished college, this isn't really a joke though, so I finished college and I was pretty burned out on school.

I had kind of an idea that I very well might want to go into the ministry eventually, but I was just really sick of school.

So the idea of going back to the seminary and all of a sudden being in a classroom and writing papers again did not sound at all attractive.

Then I tried to work jobs for a year and then I thought, I'm ready to go back to school. That's fine.

So I did kind of enough substitute taught for a while, which I really enjoyed, but I kind of figured if I was going to go back to school to get a teaching degree or something of that nature, if I wanted to teach something,

I was just going to want to teach theology. If I was going to teach theology, I was going to want to preach theology.

So I had about a year off between college and seminary and had enough of the work world to figure that I was ready to go back to school pretty quickly.

And you have, by God's providence, wound up as the pastor of River of Life Lutheran Church in Shanahan, Illinois.

And am I mispronouncing Shanahan? Is it Shanahan, Shanahone? It's Shanahan, yes.

We're far enough away from the city where stuff is named after Indian tribe stuff.

There's an Indian word for something or other. I think maybe where the rivers meet or something like that. We've got four rivers all colliding out here in Shanahan.

And we're about an hour southwest of Chicago. So when you get to the closer suburbs of Chicago, at least if you're an outsider like I am, if you're not from the area, it's really hard to tell where everything is because every city has the same name.

It's all Park Forest or Forest Park or Oak Lawn or Oak Park. They have about six words that are all in rotation for all the names of all their suburbs.

Now, I mentioned when I was giving the name of the church just a few moments ago that you are a congregation in the

Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. And those kinds of things are very important to say because, as you know, there are

Lutherans that we would not consider either Christian or Lutheran.

And so tell us, why is there something significant about the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod?

And there are other synods as well that are biblically faithful and historically faithful to the confessions of Lutheranism, to the teachings of Martin Luther.

Of course, we, I'm sure, would agree that since we believe in Sola Scriptura, that we would only embrace those things that Martin Luther taught that we find in Scripture also.

But tell us, what is unique about the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod? Yeah, so there are a handful of Lutheran Church bodies in the

United States. There tends to be kind of a relatively complex history for why there are so many.

Obviously, the simplest reason is because the Lutheran Church is not like Catholicism, and there's no

Pope of Lutheranism, as much as I've been trying to get that position. And so on account of that, when various people were coming to the

United States, there were some groups of Lutherans that were coming here for completely non -theological reasons, or just coming here for kind of the

American opportunity, and there were a lot that came here for very explicitly religious freedom purposes that were coming from countries where they were being forced into religious practices and basically forced into fellowship with people that they didn't share a common confession with.

So they came here to seek the freedom to worship according to their conscience. So basically what happened was you had a number of different groups that historically considered themselves

Lutheran and were on kind of a sliding scale of how many of the writings from what we call the

Book of Concord. And the Book of Concord is a series of writings from basically first and second generation

Lutherans that just kind of put forth the establishing documents of what it means to be a

Lutheran. So being a Lutheran is not so much necessarily membership in one specific organization, but adherence to a number of theological doctrines.

But because there was kind of no Pope of Lutheranism to stop anyone from calling themselves

Lutheran, anyone could kind of adopt that title. So when people came here, like I say, it was kind of a sliding scale of how many of those books they accepted, which led to some of those groups forming together and other groups not.

So what essentially happened was that you had basically kind of two camps in various church bodies.

You had the more liberal -minded groups that didn't fully accept all the

Lutheran writings, and then you had what we would call the confessional groups, which were those that did.

And the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod was part of one of those groups. We, in the 1960s and 50s, 60s, and 70s, were dealing kind of with struggles of theological liberalism that had kind of crept into our seminaries and managed to actually kind of fend that stuff off in a way that I don't know that any other church body in the

United States has. And there were kind of a number of reasons for that. A big part of it was our congregational polity.

So unlike other Lutheran church bodies, unlike, say, for example, the

Episcopal Church as well, we have a congregational polity. So, you know, power structures from the bottom up, which means that congregations could choose their own pastors, and they were kind of well -represented in church conventions enough to fight off kind of this creeping liberalism that was encroaching from the seminaries and from a lot of our clergy.

And kind of since those days, there's been a pretty big widening gap between the

Lutherans in this country, so those who still hold to the initial

Lutheran, the original Lutheran teachings, and those for whom Lutheranism is more of a kind of historical marker.

So we've kind of gotten to the point where you have the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, which is the largest Lutheran church body, was kind of predominantly a

Scandinavian church body, made up of Scandinavian immigrants, and it's a church body that has kind of gone full tilt towards the progressive agenda.

They've had women's ordination since, I want to say, 1989, when they first were formed from a merger of a couple different church bodies.

They've firmly embraced gay marriage and the transgender issues and things of that nature, firmly reject the inerrancies of the scriptures, and kind of a whole host of other theological problems.

So that's the largest church body. They tend to oftentimes get the most press, which is a little bit frustrating, but despite being the largest, they're also kind of following the typical trajectory of your average mainline denomination, that they're just hemorrhaging members left and right, because for some odd reason, teaching people that you don't have anything unique to give them, and that there's nothing special going on within your walls, is not an especially winning strategy for people to show up and give you their money.

So, for some reason, McDonald's doesn't tell you when you go in there that Burger King's burgers are just as good as theirs.

No, but for whatever reason, that tends to be the approach of the mainline churches.

So the Lutheran Church of Missouri Synod is, yeah, we're frequently referred to as a conservative denomination.

You know, I mean, that's fine, I suppose, if you understand the term properly. I mean,

I would just simply say we're a church body that holds to the same doctrines that we held to, you know, from the time that Lutherans began, and certainly that holds to the teachings of the scriptures.

And so, yeah, we're a church body that rejects women's ordination, that holds to a historical view on marriage, sexuality, things of that nature, and basically still clings to the

Lutheran doctrines that we've always had. I visited an evangelical Lutheran church,

I'm talking about an Elka church, not long ago, because they had a concert.

I happen to be a lover of black a cappella gospel, and they had this gospel group, a cappella gospel group, all the members in the group were black, and I went to the concert, and one of the singers in the group got up to the microphone and began very boldly preaching the gospel and calling upon people to repent, and I was wondering if that was the first time

I think gospel was ever heard in the walls of that place, and it's interesting how the female pastor, a very sweet lady,

I don't know her that well, but I'm not really sure if she would be a regenerate person or not, but she applauded this group, and I couldn't help but wonder if the motivation might have been political correctness.

Isn't this a quaint thing that we have folks singing

Negro spirituals and so on in our church, and therefore they got the pass for preaching the gospel, where another group might have been silenced immediately, who knows.

There are certainly obviously people within the ELCA who are

Christians, and there are a lot who aren't, though I think the chief problem is that in their official doctrine now, they've firmly embraced universalism, so they've basically established themselves to not be a

Christian church body on account of that. Yeah, in fact, I was at a Bible conference very well known for its strong position on biblical inerrancy years ago.

I had a chat with a pastor in the lobby or the narthex of the church, and I asked him, where do you pastor, and he whispered, an

ELCA church, and he went, shhh. But so I know that that remnant is there.

By the way, folks, I hope to announce this website later, but the website, if you happen to be visiting

Shanahan, Illinois, or perhaps you live there, or you have family, friends, and loved ones who live there, the website for the

River of Life Lutheran Church in Shanahan, Illinois is rolshanahan .org,

R -O -L -Shanahan, and that's spelled C -H -A -N -N -O, I'm sorry, yeah, no,

C -H -A -N -N -A -H -O -N, C -H -A -N -N -A -H -O -N, so R -O -L -C -H -A -N -N -A -H -O -N .org,

and I hope that you visit there if you have the ability to.

Before I go any further, there are people who no doubt, because we even have people outside of the

Christian faith listening to our program, I occasionally even hear from Muslims, I hear from new believers, and of course

I would guess that the majority of my listeners are not Lutheran, although I know that the

Lutheran satire popularity has extended beyond the boundaries of Lutheranism, since I, myself, as a

Reformed Baptist, discovered Lutheran satire, and I happen to be a lover of humor, in fact, watching and listening to your videos for the

Lutheran satire, I began to wonder if Monty Python might have been some kind of an influence, and of course

Martin Luther himself, known for his earthy humor, but I want to play the video, now

I hope that you folks who are listening keep in mind the visual of the videos add a lot to these hysterically funny

Lutheran satire videos, and we are on radio obviously, so we don't have the luxury of showing you the video, but I still think you will find the audio of this video hilarious.

It was the video that I saw that first introduced me to Hans Feeney's humor and the

Lutheran satire videos. It was close to St. Patrick's Day a few years ago, and somebody had posted this on Facebook, I believe, is where I first saw it, but I'm going to play for you the audio of one of Hans Feeney's Lutheran satire videos, which is

St. Patrick's Bad Analogies. Here we go. Okay, Patrick, tell us a bit more about this

Trinity thing. Yeah, Patrick, tell us. But remember that we're simple people without your fancy education and books and learning, and we're hearing about all of this for the first time, so try to keep it simple, okay,

Patrick? Yeah, real simple, Patrick. Sure, there are three persons of the

Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, yet there is only one

God. Don't get what you're saying here, Patrick. Not picking up what you're laying down here, Patrick.

Could you use an analogy, Patrick? Sure. The Trinity is like water, and how you can find water in three different forms, liquid and ice and vapor.

That's mordalism, Patrick! What? Mordalism, an ancient heresy confessed by teachers such as Noatus and Sibelius, which espouses that God is not three distinct persons, but that he merely reveals himself in three different forms.

This heresy was clearly condemned in Canon I at the First Council of Constantinople in 381 A .D., and those who confess it cannot rightly be considered a part of the

Church Catholic. Come on, Patrick! Yeah, get it together, Patrick! Okay, then the

Trinity is like the sun in the sky, where you have the star and the light and the heat.

Oh, Patrick. Come on, Patrick! That's Arianism, Patrick!

Arianism? Yes, Arianism, Patrick, a theology which states that Christ and the Holy Spirit are creations of the

Father and not one in nature with him, exactly like how heat and light are not the star itself, but are merely creations of the star.

That's a bad analogy, Patrick! You're the worst, Patrick! All right, sorry. The Trinity is like this three -leaf clover here.

I'm gonna stop you right there, Patrick. Yeah, hold your horses, Patrick. You're about to confess partialism.

Partialism? Yes, partialism, a heresy which asserts that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not distinct persons of the

Godhead, but are different parts of God, each composing one -third of the divine.

And who confesses the heresy of partialism? The first season of the cartoon program Voltron, where five robot lion cars merge together to form one giant robot samurai, obviously.

I've never heard of Voltron. Of course you haven't. It's not gonna exist for another 1 ,500 years now, Patrick. Yeah, get with the program,

Patrick. I mean really, Patrick. I'm gonna stab you in the face, Patrick. Okay, that was probably a bit much.

All right, I'll try again. The Trinity is like how the same man can be a husband and a father and an employer.

Modalism again. All right, then it's like the three layers of an animal. Partialism revisited.

Fine. The Trinity is a mystery which cannot be comprehended by human reason, but is understood only through faith and is best confessed in the words of the

Athanasian Creed, which states that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity, neither confusing the persons nor dividing the substance, that we are compelled by the

Christian truth to confess that each distinct person is God and Lord, and that the deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is one, equal in glory, co -equal in majesty.

Well, why didn't you just say that, Patrick? Yeah, quit beating around the bush, Patrick. Now let's all put on some giant green foam hats, get riotously drunk, and vomit in the

Chicago River to celebrate our conversion. So what do you guys do for a living?

Well, we come from a long line of snake farmers, Patrick, but truth be told, business has been real bad lately.

Oh. Yeah, about that. Now, I have to ask you,

I know that you are at least the voice of St.

Patrick in that video, because I remember when I heard your voice when

I was having my first conversation with you on the phone, I said to myself, wait a minute, that is St.

Patrick. Now, do you do all the voices? Do you do the Irish accents in all of that?

Yeah, the very poor Irish accents. I think I pitch shift those up a little bit, just so it gives it a little bit more of a distinct sound to it.

But yeah, so I tend to do most of my own voices. Every now and then, if I do a video that has a lot of characters,

I might bring someone else in, but I am rather particular.

When people help me out, I don't pay them anything. So I don't like to boss people around and tell them to do things ten times when

I'm not paying, but I will still boss them around and tell them to do things ten times. So I tend to try to do as much stuff as I can myself, because that way

I only have myself to get annoyed at for not being good enough at acting. Now, how about the animation?

Do you do that as well? Well, so my friend Matthew Carver does the drawings for me.

So he designs the characters. So Donald O 'Connell, he designed, in other videos, he's designed

Frank the Hippie Pope and Al Horace and virtually every character that I've used, as long as I'm not taking it from St.

Patrick as an icon that I found on the Internet and stuff like that. And then I take the images that he draws and I plug them into my animation software, which has facial recognition, which can make them talk, and then

I just upload the audio files of the dialogue, and it just generates them speaking.

So it can be a little bit of a tedious process, but by and large works pretty well.

Yeah, the technology these days is far more advanced than when I was a kid. When I was about 12, 13 years old,

I actually had a camera that was capable, a movie camera that was capable of making animation, and I have always been artistic and was an art major in college, and I made a few animated films when

I was a kid, but this has always been something that is near and dear to my heart.

And being a huge Monty Python fan as a kid, Terry Gilliam was a hero of mine, and I hope that Terry Gilliam actually gets a hold of your videos because he would probably find them hilarious as well, even though he's, to my knowledge, not a

Christian, but I think that the humor might be universal enough where he would find it humorous as well.

Yeah, we're going to our first break right now, and if you have a question for our guest today...

Oh, by the way, before I forget, Harold Sankbile, the executive director of Doxology, the

Lutheran Center for Spiritual Care and Counsel, said to say hello to you, has very fond memories of you, and I interviewed him recently on his book

The Care of Souls Cultivating a Pastor's Heart, and he wanted me to send his greetings.

Oh, good, yeah, he's a wonderful man. I probably took more classes from him at the seminary than I did anyone else.

Just a wonderful professor and a wonderful guy. Great. Well, we are going to our break, as I said before, our first break.

If you have a question for Hans Feeney about the Lutheran satire, about our subject and appropriate

Christian use of humor, or basically if you have a general question on Lutheranism or Christianity as well, you can send in an email to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com,

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. We'll be right back after these messages, so don't go away. Got to tell you, for my money,

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Harvey Cedars, where Christ finds people and changes lives. Hi, this is

John Sampson, pastor of King's Church in Peoria, Arizona. Taking a moment of your day to talk about Chris Arnzen and the

Arn Sharpen's Iron podcast. I consider Chris a true friend and a man of high integrity. He's a skilled interviewer who's not afraid to ask the big penetrating questions while always defending the key doctrines of the

Christian faith. I've always been happy to point people to this podcast knowing it's one of the very few safe places on the internet where folk won't be led astray.

I believe this podcast needs to be heard far and wide. This is a day of great spiritual compromise, and yet God has raised

Chris up for just such a time. And knowing this, it's up to us as members of the Body of Christ to stand with such a ministry in prayer and in finances.

I'm pleased to do so, and would like to ask you to prayerfully consider joining me in supporting

Arn Sharpen's Iron financially. Would you consider sending either a one -time gift or even becoming a regular monthly partner with this ministry?

I know it would be a huge encouragement to Chris, if you would. All the details can be found at ironsharpensironradio .com

where you can click support. That's ironsharpensironradio .com Welcome back, this is

Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, today our guest for the full two hours with just a little less than 90 minutes to go is

Hans Feeney, who is the Lutheran satire guy, and he's also the pastor of the

River of Life Lutheran Church in Shanahan, Illinois, which is a congregation in the

Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. Our topic of the day is An Appropriate Christian Use of Humor, and our email address, if you have a question, is chrisarnzen at gmail .com

chrisarnzen at gmail .com c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA, and only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. We have

John in Bangor, Maine, who wants to know did you always have a sense of humor even as a kid?

Were you a class clown? Or were you one of those more quiet people who can express humor in different ways without standing up in public and telling jokes?

Yeah, I don't know if I would classify myself as a class clown. I was always a bit of a goofball, and I always enjoyed making jokes and kind of being a bit,

I suppose, theatrical. So, yeah, I mean, I used to...

My dad tells stories about, you know, how I would put on costumes in the house. Like, I would stuff... My idea of a costume, because this was back in the days, when, like, my kids all have costumes now, because you can get really great, nice -looking superhero costumes.

And, you know, back when I was a kid, it was, you'd get a Halloween costume, like the hard plastic that would cut your face.

Yeah, I remember that. The hard plastic wire. So those weren't really fun to wear, but I would wear... I would, like, stuff...

Put a paper behind my glasses and come up to my dad doing weird voices, saying, do you know who I am? So he liked to tell that story.

So there's been, I suppose... I've always kind of had a bit of that. And, yeah,

I've always kind of, like, goofing around. I've been... You mentioned Monty Python before. I fell in love with Monty Python first seeing...

It was on TV, so I guess I didn't see all of it, but seeing a part of Monty Python and the

Holy Grail when I was young. I mean, maybe six or seven years old. And it's the scene where he's pressuring the kid who doesn't want to marry the...

Yes! And the bit where Lancelot keeps running... They keep showing him running off, you know, running off of the horizon.

And the clip keeps looping, and then all of a sudden he's right there. And I just thought that was hysterical.

I snuck into that movie, and I'm not advocating this to any children listening, but I snuck into that movie 13 times with my friends when we were kids, back in the days when maybe it still was easy to do that, but it was really easy to do when

I was a kid. And that has always been one of my favorite movies.

Right, yeah. So that stuff was always a big influence on me. You know, that Calvin and Hobbes, I think, was probably a big thing, too.

And then I suppose I probably just kind of attribute a lot... I have a very odd sense of humor, and I think in that I have a profoundly dark sense of humor.

It probably doesn't even come across as dark as it is in Losing Sapphire, because I tend to temper it a little bit for that kind of audience.

But I also don't like vulgar kind of potty humor.

So, well, vulgar humor. I still laugh heartily at potty humor, but vulgar humor

I don't appreciate. And profanity, I'm not a fan of. So I think you can kind of see that in the mixture of where I grew up.

So I grew up in Utah, where they all have fake Mormon swear words because they don't use the real ones. But then we moved to Connecticut when

I was about eight years old, and Connecticut's very East Coast, high kind of anxiety, and sort of a cynical place.

So you kind of combine those two things, and then having grown up again in Indiana, which is where I moved to when

I was 12, and that's very much what I consider home. So if you kind of wrap up that very sort of dark, cynical sense of humor and very kind of sweet Midwestern and Utah traffic,

I suppose that's kind of where I come from. I didn't know that the Mormons had fake swear words. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I remember very distinctly kids in my neighborhood when they thought something was crazy, they would say,

Oh, my heck! That phrase has always stuck with me, and it will never stop being adorable to me.

We have Mary in Cork, Ireland, who has a question.

Mary wants to know, Do you find humor appropriate when very important and sacred themes of Scripture are used for humor?

For instance, an ice cream parlor owner might have flavors that are similar to something like propitiation pineapple and resurrection raspberry if he is a

Christian who owns an ice cream parlor. Is that crossing the line? Is that using sacred for humorous purposes that is inappropriate?

Yeah, that's something I would not be comfortable with. In my videos, I've always tried to draw a very clear line to make it very clear what it is that I'm making fun of so that when you are when you're playing with something what you're really mocking is false teaching and false ideas or maybe even just sometimes kind of idiosyncrasies and goofiness and silliness and sinners.

So sometimes I'll do videos that aren't really so much bound up in false teaching and false teachers as much as it is this is just kind of a sort of silly annoying thing that Christians have a tendency to do.

By the way, if I can give a shout -out to one of my favorite Twitter accounts which is The Wrestling Pastor which is just a series of it's just a guy who posts gifs from professional wrestling matches of people doing various moves to each other and throwing guys out of the ring and stuff like that and he'll post it in response to so it's some question that a person will ask the pastor and then the pastor's sort of angry response but you know he doesn't really give but kind of wants to give like when people who people who never show up for church and never volunteer for anything complain that you don't do enough stuff and things of that nature.

So that's good stuff to make fun of. I think though that you certainly ought to be careful with when

God gives you very sacred words in the Scriptures when he gives you beautiful and holy concepts and ideas

I think you've got to be careful not to belittle those things and not to make light of them just for the sake of kind of a cheap pun.

So yes, I don't know that I would necessarily go all the way and say that doing such things is sinful but it's certainly not something that I am comfortable with.

Well thank you Mary in Cork, Ireland so please keep listening to Iron Trip and Zion Radio and spreading the word in Ireland and beyond about the program.

I was certain by the way that the question was going to be I was certain that the question was going to be whether I why my

Irish accent was so bad and I wasn't going to have a good I was not going to have a good answer for that.

I actually was blessed when I did a parody of Martin Luther in song

I was blessed that a German woman that I know who is a senior citizen now and living in a nursing home her husband, who is now in heaven with the

Lord was from Switzerland and she was from Germany and they actually thought that my

German accent was spot on as far as an American or a German speaking English.

Well that's good. I feel like German is a fairly easy accent though. Irish is tough.

I don't mean to take away from your compliment. Sorry for that. It's something that's easy is what

I'm trying to say. Irish is rather difficult. It's easy to get cartoonishly right if you're doing kind of the

Lucky Charms leprechaun but it's hard to do it real justice in kind of an accurate sense.

But English, German, French, those I find to be fairly easy. Irish is a bit tougher. Yeah, in fact,

I was surprised years ago when Brad Pitt was in a movie he played an

IRA terrorist and I can't remember the name of it. Oh, was that The Devil's Own? Yes, yes.

By the way, I never saw that movie but I'm really proud of myself for remembering that he played that.

And Harrison Ford was in that too. Yes, yes. And I have not seen a second of that movie but I remembered that and I'm really proud of myself for that.

Harrison Ford was a police officer who unknowingly lets Brad Pitt's character stay in his home, rent a room in his home not knowing that he was an

IRA terrorist. And I was surprised that he was being lambasted by critics that is

Brad Pitt for having a horrible Irish accent but in my ears, I'm not from Ireland but in my ears

I thought he was spot on. I've got to ask more Irish people about that. Yeah. Let's see here.

We have Ronald in Eastern Suffolk County, Long Island who says, you said before that you are not a fan of potty humor.

Wasn't Luther a big fan of potty humor? Yes, well I had to clarify there.

I'm not a fan of licentious humor. I'm not a fan of... For example, if you're a stand -up comedian

I respect you infinitely more if you don't engage in blue humor just because I think blue humor is cheap and easy.

But yeah, in terms of actual poop jokes those I have a very juvenile sense of humor and greatly appreciate those.

And I feel like I'm... I theologically am justified in that because Luther talked about that stuff all the time.

So yeah, that stuff's great. Now, if my memory serves me right there is a woodcut of...

I don't know if it was commissioned by Luther I don't know if he actually created it himself or perhaps it was unrelated to Luther but I thought it was connected to Luther where he has himself passing wind in the

Pope's face and there's flames shooting out towards the Pope. I think that might be a combination of a few things.

So Luther would talk about when the devil is harassing you basically quote scripture at him and then if he won't leave you alone just rip one in his face to sort of mock the devil.

And then there were Reformation -era woodcuts. I don't think

Luther had anything to do with these but they were put out at the time that had people basically to quote

Monty Python farting in the general direction of the Pope. Well, we have to go to our midway break right now.

Our midway break is longer than our normal breaks because Grace Life Radio 90 .1

FM in Lake City, Florida requires of us a longer break in the middle of the show because they air their own public service announcements to localize

Zion Trip and Zion Radio to Lake City, Florida a requirement of the FCC. So while they air their public service announcements we air our own globally heard commercials and we urge you please not if you're listening to this on a recording

I understand if you like to fast forward through the commercials and get to the content but please don't always do that.

Please listen to our commercials and write down the information because we rely upon our advertisers to exist.

If our advertisers are not getting any responses at all then I'm assuming that some of them will eventually just jump ship and stop advertising with us.

So please try to patronize our advertisers as often as you can write down the information that they provide so you can contact them more successfully and frequently and we ask you to patronize them and also use this time to write down questions for Hans Feeney on an appropriate

Christian use of humor and our email address again is chrisarmson at gmail .com chrisarmson at gmail .com

Don't go away, God willing we'll be right back with Hans Feeney and more of our subject An Appropriate Christian Use of Humor.

I'm so grateful to our Sovereign God that while manning an exhibitor's booth for Iron, Sharp and Zion a major Bible conference

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historicalbiblesociety .org today. Thank you, Daniel P. Buttafuoco, attorney at law, for your faithful support of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

Welcome back, this is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. If you just tuned us in, our guest today for the full two hours, with a little less than an hour to go, is

Hans Feeney, the Lutheran satire guy and pastor of River of Life Lutheran Church in Shenahan, Illinois.

Our discussion is on the theme, An Appropriate Christian Use of Humor, and we will be returning to that discussion momentarily after I tell you about a couple of events that I hope that you attend, if at all possible.

First of all, I am going to be, God willing, heading back to my old stomping grounds this

December, New York City, to attend an event that I love participating in, and that is the

Foundations Conference, which is a conference orchestrated and hosted by sermonaudio .com.

And they are very finicky, very fussy, and rightfully so, about who they permit to speak at this conference.

And the roster at this event includes Dr. Stephen J. Lawson, Paul Washer, Rev.

Jeff Thomas, Rev. Armin Tomasian, Richard Colwell Jr., and Andrew Quigley. The dates are

Thursday and Friday, December 19th and 20th, right in the heart of the Christmas season, and I can't think of a better place to be during the

Christmas season than in New York City. And I hope you join me there. This is, by the way, for men in ministry leadership only.

It's a small venue. They can only seat less than 200 people, so they have restricted attendance to men in ministry leadership.

If you'd like to join me there, go to thefoundationsconference .com, thefoundationsconference .com,

to register. Then in January, I'm packing up my bags again and heading down south this time to the

G3 Conference. The G3 stands for Gospel, Grace, and Glory. This is quite an extraordinary conference.

This January, it is on the theme, Worship Matters. You've been hearing Todd Friel of Wretched TV and Wretched Radio and Dr.

James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries discuss this phenomenal conference, where they both will be speaking.

This is a place that I have really been blessed by being in attendance probably more than any other thing that I have attended.

I man an exhibitor's booth there every year. This will be my fourth G3 conference, manning an exhibitor's booth.

The speakers include Dr. Stephen J. Lawson. We have Derek Thomas, who is a world -renowned

Presbyterian preacher, teacher, writer, and conference speaker. My friend,

Dr. Tom Askell, who is the Executive Director of Founders Ministries, which is a Calvinistic ministry within the

Southern Baptist Convention. As I said before, Todd Friel of Wretched TV and Wretched Radio, Dr.

James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, Stephen J. Nichols, who is the

President of Reformation Bible College, the college founded by the late R .C. Sproul and Ligonier Ministries, and my friend

Phil Johnson, the Executive Director of Grace to You, the media ministry of John MacArthur, and many more.

And, as you may have heard on those ads that I aired previously, John MacArthur himself has been added to the lineup.

I would go to this conference if it was just John MacArthur. I'm looking forward to this with bated breath, and I hope you join me at the

G3 conference that's Thursday, January 16th, through Saturday, January 18th, 2020.

And I strongly urge you not only to register to attend, but if you have a business, a parachurch organization, an event, something that you want to promote to the body of Christ when a large number of people are present,

I strongly urge you to register for an exhibitor's booth in addition to just registering as an attendee.

As I said, I have been manning an exhibitor's booth there every year. This will be my fourth year, and I have always received an enormous blessing by doing that.

They have typically over 5 ,000 people there every year, and with John MacArthur being added to the lineup,

I really believe with great confidence that they're going to have over 6 ,000 people there. So if you want to join me there,

January 16th through the 18th, in 2020, go to G3conference .com, G3conference .com.

And last but not least, if you love my show and you don't want it to disappear from the airwaves, please go to www .irontreppernsironradio

.com, click support, then click, click to donate now. You can donate instantly with a debit or credit card by doing so, and you can also mail in a check the old fashion way via snail mail to the address that appears on the screen, and that check will be made out to Iron Trepperns Iron Radio.

The things that I try to remind you about every day when I make my appeals for donations, please never, ever siphon money away from your regular giving that you're accustomed to to your local church in order to support

Iron Trepperns Iron Radio. Never do that. Never put your family in financial jeopardy if you're having a hard time making ends meet in order to give to Iron Trepperns Iron Radio.

Those two things are commands of God, providing for your church and providing for your family. Providing for my show is obviously not a command of God, but if you're financially blessed above and beyond your ability to obey those two commands, you have extra money collecting interest in the bank, you have extra money for recreational and trivial purposes, for coffee, for ice cream, for candy, for baseball games, football games, basketball games, hockey games coming up, and you feel that you can sacrifice some of that money, please help us out if you love the show.

And if you don't love the show, I'm not sure why you're listening. But if you love the show, please go to irontreppernsironradio .com, click support, then click click to donate now.

If you want to advertise with us, we can sure use your advertising dollars. Send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail dot com, chrisarnson at gmail dot com, and put advertising in the subject line.

As long as whatever it is you're promoting is compatible with what I believe, then I will help you launch an ad campaign immediately.

Of course, you do not have to believe identically with me, but you need to be promoting something that's compatible with what

I believe. If you are not a member of a Bible -believing church, and you're not even prayerfully looking for one, you're living in rebellion against God.

There are no lone wolves and mavericks in the scriptures who believe that they don't need a church, that they don't need elders to submit to.

So please, rectify that situation. I have lists of biblically faithful churches all over the world.

I have helped many people in our audience find churches where they have either joined or visited when they were on vacation, or recommended to their loved ones.

In fact, I just got an email I haven't responded to yet, but somebody from Bristol, England who listens to this show wants me to find a church for them or help them at any rate.

Well, please send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail dot com, and put in the subject line, I need a church. It's chrisarnson at gmail dot com, chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

That's also the email address where you can send in a question to Hans Feeney on an appropriate

Christian use of humor. That's chrisarnson at gmail dot com, chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

And I assume you're still with us Hans? I am still with you. Great, well I am going to play another audio clip of another one of your classic videos.

This is Frank the Hippie Pope, and I hope that you all enjoy. Hello, and welcome to Frank the

Hippie Pope, the show where I say things and confuse everyone in the world when

I say things. Here's how the show works. You call and ask me a loaded question,

I answer in a way that makes it sound like I'm overturning official Catholic doctrine, and then my producer

Jeff runs damage control. Isn't that right Jeff? That's right. Are you totally psyched for today's show?

Not really, no. Okay, so let's begin. Caller number one, what's your question?

Jeff. Dude, I know, right?

It's like, there's so many more positive things to talk about. Like God made butterflies and stuff.

Uh, Jeff? The Catechism of the Catholic Church states, since the first century the church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion.

This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Despite his sloppy wording, Pope Francis is in no way overturning this position or speaking against it.

Thank you Jeff. Also, the reason so many churches obsess over abortion is probably because approximately 42 million innocent children throughout the world are murdered in the womb every year.

Oh, that's right. Okay, caller number two. Dude, God is cool with everyone.

No, Pope Francis is not fine with gay marriage. He holds to the official position of the Catholic Church, which is that homosexual activity is sinful and that marriage is, by nature and God's command, the union of one man and one woman.

What the Pope probably meant was that Jesus died for those who endure same -sex attraction and wants them to find forgiveness in the life of the church.

Yeah, that's what I just said, right? No, it is not. You gave the impression that God doesn't require people who engage in homosexual activity to repent.

Well, yeah, but if a guy is like, dude, I'm a gay Christian, like, who am I to judge, you know?

You're the Pope? The supreme pontiff? The true vicar of Christ, the head of the whole church and father and teacher of all

Christians. To you, full power has been given to tend, rule, and govern the universal church. According to the group of people that you lead, there is literally no one on the face of the planet more qualified to judge than you.

Oh, man, was I supposed to get, like, a manual with this job? Did I forget what

I'm supposed to be doing, like, all the time? Next caller. Youth unemployment.

No, he absolutely cannot be serious because that would just be unbelief, violence, warfare, slavery, child abuse, murderous persecution of Christians, the destruction of the family,

AIDS, malaria, Ebola, that's ten things off the top of my head that are infinitely worse than youth unemployment.

So clearly his high holiness didn't understand the question. Yeah, let me try that one again.

Can you, like, re -ask that? Carpal tunnel syndrome.

I can't figure out if that's my favorite one or the one on St.

Patrick. Well, thank you, I appreciate it. Now, am

I speaking to Jeff right now, or am I speaking to Honest? Yeah, Jeff is.

Usually in every video there's a straight man and there's the comic, and the comic generally has some sort of funny voice or accent, and the straight man is just straightforward, so that's usually just my normal voice.

Well, we do have a question that actually relates very much to that comical clip that we just played.

We have Susan Margaret in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, and she asks, is it ever appropriate to use humor when mocking someone that is infamous about something that is so horrible or heretical that they don't deserve any kind of civil interaction other than to mock them?

Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I suppose that, you know, generally the rule I try to follow is to mock ideas rather than real specifically people, but yeah, there are kind of sort of high crimes and misdemeanors type of folks who get kind of so interwoven into that that it becomes kind of impossible to separate them from the false teaching that they're advocating, and I don't really know what the threshold for that is, but I know kind of, you know, you kind of get the sense that there's certainly certain characters where certain people where they're just kind of fair game, because they're kind of inseparable from the stuff that they taught, you know, so I'm not going to go out of,

I'm not going to pick on, you know, some small town preacher who's, you know, kind of bought into the prosperity gospel stuff, but I'm going to, you know,

I don't have a problem with going after Joel Osteen directly, because he's kind of, you know, just inseparable from that stuff, and yeah,

I think in the same way there are certainly figures throughout history who, you know, through their various writings and actions and things of that nature kind of earns the right to be the figure who sort of represents the thing, you know, the thing that they espouse, and so I think there's certainly fair game when it comes to things of that nature.

Well and of course, I think, you rightfully included the Pope in that category, Pope Francis.

In fact, the conservative Catholic has really got a lot to be frustrated over these days, because this man that they call their

Pope is mind -bogglingly leftist, and not only is he right -wing, but he's also left -wing.

I mean, the Roman Catholic Church in its magisterium has always denied clear and crucial and vital salvific doctrines, which is one of the reasons that the

Reformation obviously began. I would dispute with you on that.

They haven't always formally denied those things. It wasn't until the Council of Trent after the

Reformation that the Roman Catholic Church formally rejected the doctrine of justification by grace and faith alone.

Right. Well, I guess I use the term—by the way, I am a former Catholic. I use the term

Roman Catholic in a different way, and that would be to connect directly to Trent.

Catholic with a small c, there have always been a mixture of—a remnant of Christians that were faithful to the scriptures.

In fact, the Church of Rome executed many of them that would profess to be

Catholic. But, yeah, I should be more careful about my terminology that it was where they formally denied the gospel and also anathematized those that believe in the gospel at the

Council of Trent. Right. Their response to the Reformation. Right, yeah.

And—go ahead. No, I was just going to say, yeah, so the Pope is kind of tied up in that stuff, and obviously those—kind of the

Frank the Hippie Pope character is—that's kind of what I'm trying to present with that is kind of this notion of sort of, yeah, this kind of aimless doctrine that the—formless doctrine that the

Catholic Church is having under the Pope. It's been—there's a bit of schadenfreude for a Lutheran in watching this.

You know, I think—I suppose if you look at the general history of things, most modern

Catholics have actually been fairly blessed. I use that term kind of lightly. But they've been fairly blessed in terms of the

Popes that they've had in their lives. You know, they've been pretty well spared, you know, some of the really kind of egregious stuff that you would have found, you know, certainly in the

Middle Ages and even beyond then. So, you know, the idea of having a

Pope who has precious little regard that oftentimes seems for Catholic doctrine is certainly not a novel thing, but it probably kind of feels that way for a lot of Roman Catholics.

But as a Lutheran, yeah, I do sort of get a kick out of it, of looking at—talking to Catholics who are just really all this—very nervous for the first time in their lives about this idea of one guy just speaking for the entire

Church. And you go, yeah, that's—we didn't like that either. We just ran into that problem a long time before you guys did.

And we do have a listener. We have C .J.

in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York, who says, Would you consider the occurrence on Mount Carmel in the

Old Testament an example of where God used mockery in a way that he actually obviously chose to be a benefit to God's people, since it is

God -breathed in the Scriptures? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's kind of one of the key passages

I would go to to point out where and when the Scriptures use humor.

So, yeah, when Elijah is kind of squaring off with the prophets of Baal, and they basically have this kind of showdown where they're going to offer up—they're each going to offer up their sacrifices and see which one is acceptable, and the prophets of Baal are freaking out and going nuts trying to get their sacrifice lit.

And Elijah mocks them and basically says to them—I mean, getting back to the use of potty humor—basically says,

Is your God too busy going to the bathroom to hear your prayers, to respond to your own sacrifice?

So, yeah, there's certainly a—there's certainly biblical precedent for these things.

And Jesus even basically, ostensibly, uses kind of a form of humor or snark or whatever you might want to call it, you know, with the

Pharisees all the time when He's constantly mocking them, when He's referring to Herod as a fox and calling the

Pharisees whitewash tombs, you know, kind of things of this nature. There's definitely a very biblical precedent for that. You see it when—you certainly see it in the

Apostle Paul when he is—in his letters to the Galatians, when he's talking to those who have been persuaded by the circumcision hymn.

Oh, yeah. You know, become convinced that they need to be circumcised in order to be saved.

And he basically says to them, Well, if you think that cutting off part of your anatomy makes you so profoundly holy, why don't you just go for pure holiness and just cut the entire thing off?

Right. So there's definitely—there definitely are certainly scriptural examples of that stuff quite frequently.

We have R .J. in White Plains, New York, who asks, Do you frequently get complaints about your humor?

And I was wondering if, in particular, any of those complaints come from fellow Lutherans.

Yeah, I get—well, generally the way things work is, at least for people who watch my videos, the common refrain whenever I make a video about something that they think is good that I'm saying is bad, the common refrain is,

I thought all of your videos were great until this one. So I tend to—you know, so that's happened with Catholics, it's happened with Calvinists, it's certainly happened with fellow

Lutherans as well. One of the angrier emails I got was a few months ago,

I put out a video called Clint Eastwood reads praise song lyrics. Oh, yeah, I remember that.

Yes. And just kind of highlighting the vacuousness and repetitiveness and, you know, general emptiness of a lot of modern praise music.

And yeah, I got any—and it was a very odd exchange. It was a brief exchange, and it didn't—the conversation didn't go as long as I'd hoped it would.

But I asserted in the video that—so that the scriptures teach that the purpose of sacred music is to teach.

And so it's one of the Colossians 3 .16. I have to look this up here to get the exact verbiage here.

But, you know, it's kind of on that note where, let's see, Paul writes—hold on, internet connection.

While you're looking, I'll give our email address out. That's ChrisArnzen at gmail .com, C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

Please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal or private matter.

Perhaps you disagree with your own pastor on something that we're talking about. Perhaps you're a pastor, you disagree with your own congregation or denomination.

We can understand you being anonymous, but if it's just a general question, please give us your first name, city, and state or country of residence.

That's ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. So, yes, I got it here.

Colossians 3 .16, Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

So I take it from that verse that the teaching and the admonishing and then listing with the singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs afterwards, that's an extension of how that teaching is to be done, so that the purpose of sacred music is to teach.

And I forget exactly how I phrased it in the video, but that was kind of the idea. And I got an email from a fellow

Lutheran pastor who accused me of adding to the word of God because I had basically interpreted this passage in such a way that he disagreed with it.

And so he was insisting that the passage didn't say that at all. My response was, is it your position that the purpose of sacred music is not to teach?

And then I didn't hear back from him after that point. So, yeah,

I think it was just a guy who probably uses a lot of that type of music in his worship service and didn't like the insinuation that we should use stuff that's better, which is, again, is odd to me.

I mean, for me, the kind of the issue of instrumentation and arrangement and stuff like that is not really a big issue.

The issue to me is just simply, if the purpose of sacred music is to teach, then we have a pretty objective standard of measurement for whether a piece of church music is good.

And so does it proclaim the gospel? Does it teach who Christ is? And does it clearly do those things? And a piece of music that does that is better than one that doesn't, better than one that's rather vague and empty.

So it's an odd thing to me that that's a debate, but it's a debate that is raging on, certainly in the

Lutheran Church and the Third Ascendant. We have B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who says,

I enjoy humor very much, and I even enjoy hearing a preacher occasionally insert something funny into a sermon, but one thing makes my skin crawl is when a preacher uses the majority of his message, or even a great portion of it, to do a stand -up comedy routine.

Does this bother you as much as it bothers me? Yes, very much so.

It's kind of an odd thing for me, being a little bit known as a guy who jokes about theology on the

Internet. I'll occasionally have people who will come to church, just because they were coming through the area and they know me or have heard about me and stuff, and I'm always a little nervous when that happens, because I'm very different in the divine worship service than I am in my videos.

I'm very straightforward, straightway. I'll occasionally crack a joke here or there if there's kind of a point behind it.

But yeah, I think that by and large, I mean, your job as a pastor, in particular when you're up in the pulpit, is to preach

Christ crucified, to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to people. And it's not to kind of make yourself the center of attention with sort of an affable personality or with sort of a joke and kind of stand -up routine.

I do think that a lot of times, and this is very much a criticism that I would definitely level at my own church body and a lot of the guys

I know, where a lot of times guys who are in the ministry are guys who were dorks in school, which is fine.

I mean, you want your pastor to be a dork for theology. You want him to be kind of a nerd who really gets into it and knows his

Bible really well and kind of things of that nature. But the downside of that is you're oftentimes dealing with people who really would have loved to have kind of been the center of attention at another point in their life and never really got to be, and then all of a sudden it's like they found a loophole into how to get people to have to pay attention to you.

And it can oftentimes have really negative effects. So yeah, I don't like a lot of humor in my preaching, and it has to be pretty good.

I remember when I was in the seminary, there would be guys who had various kind of bureaucratic jobs in our church body who would come and they would preach in chapel, and they would always have these really bad jokes that they would kind of let loose from the pulpit.

And I used to have this idea with a cousin of mine, who's one of my best friends that we ever went to seminary with, where we should just start laughing very obnoxiously loud, you know, just for like 10 minutes, spilling over into the aisles and stuff, just so that the guy, just as a very sort of passive aggressive way of letting the guy know, don't do that.

So, you know, just disrupt the entire, the rest of the service with laughter. So yeah,

I'm not a big fan of that. I think there's a salutary place for humor. I'm not a big fan of it from the pulpit.

I think you've got to recognize that when you're in, you know, when you're in kind of a sacred spot and a sacred space, that there's a certain decorum that you want to have there.

Yeah, I 100 % agree. And in fact, a friend of mine, when

I am in her car going somewhere, she very often has an evangelical radio station on, and if I'm in the car at this particular time of day, there's a pastor who is telling jokes nonstop through his message.

And just like with Joel Osteen, who is constantly smiling,

I don't think that you can preach the whole counsel of God if you're making people laugh throughout the entire sermon, or if you're smiling throughout the entire sermon.

You can't be preaching the whole counsel of God. There are things in the scriptures that are not intended to put you at ease or to make you smile or make you laugh.

Some things are intended to strike horror and conviction into your heart. Right. Yeah, and I think that,

I mean, there are ways in which humor can be of benefit to that, but it's generally an exception to the rule.

Now, granted, it's kind of, I try to sort of, you know, make a career out of the exception to the rule with Lutheran satire, but a lot of times humor enables you to get really close to something that can otherwise be very difficult to talk about, you know?

And I think he wasn't really using humor, but I think you see the same thing in the approach that Nathan takes with David about his adultery, where he presents this hypothetical situation to him.

Right, with the lamb. Right, and then he kind of flips it at the last second and says, you're the man that I'm talking about.

And David is already too emotionally invested in the story to be able to back out of it, you know, at that point.

And I think humor has a great potential and ability to do that, where it enables you to talk about, you know, really serious issues in such a way that you can get close to people and talk about these things in a way where they might not otherwise be terribly receptive to it, and then you can kind of flip the tables on them.

But it's hard to do, and that's generally, in most of the jokes I've heard from the pulpit throughout the years, that's generally not what guys are doing.

And likewise, you know, just from the sake of the... the best way to accomplish that as a parish pastor in general,

I've found, you know, in my experience as a parish pastor, if people always know that you're going to preach the gospel, if you're always going to tell them that their sins are forgiven, and if you're always going to...

if you're always going to heal the wounds that you kind of tear open with the preaching of the law, so in other words, if you're going to preach against, you know, whatever the sin is, that they always know that you're going to then tell them that that sin has been forgiven, and that there's peace for them in the blood of Christ, and that the blood of Christ has erased that sin from the memory of God.

Once they know that they can trust you to do that, you can say anything. You can preach against anything that needs to be preached against, because over time they're just...they

learn it's safe for the pastor to tear you apart on account of your sinfulness, because you're always going to be pieced back together and healed through the blood of Jesus in the gospel preaching.

We have Bobby in Hartsdale, New York, who wants to know, do you ever make fun of Lutherans in your satire?

Oh yes, quite a bit. Yeah, I mean, when

I started off, that was really all I did was just kind of making fun of stuff that was fairly inside baseball for Lutherans.

I still do that from time to time, but as the audience got kind of bigger, I started kind of taking on bigger things.

But yeah, absolutely, there are a lot of my videos that are making fun of Lutherans. I've got a couple of scripts in the can, too, that are working on that as well.

Those are my people and that's kind of my primary audience, so those are the ones I can kind of make fun of the most severely, because they know how much

I love them. How about one where you have a Wisconsin Synod husband who can't even pray at the dinner table with his

Missouri Synod wife? Yeah, well, that's really inside baseball.

But I do have one from a number of years ago, back in the early days when I was using the robo -voices on the

Wisconsin Synod, and they have a rather different understanding of the Office of the

Ministry than we do in the LCMS, which is, again, it's rather inside baseball. It's important for us, but it doesn't always make a whole lot of sense to those kind of outside of our circles.

Well, we have to go to our final break. It will be much more brief than the last one. If you have a question, send it in quickly, because we're rapidly running out of time.

Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com. chrisarnson at gmail dot com. We hope to hear from you very soon, and we'll be right back,

God willing, with more of our guest speaking on an appropriate use of Christian human.

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Well, we are back now with our final segment of our interview today with Hans Feeney, and our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Before we go to any listener questions, Hans, I would like you to have a few minutes uninterrupted where you could summarize what you most etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners about the subject of an appropriate use of Christian humor.

Sure. Well, I'm going to have a lot of thoughts on this. I suppose kind of the main thought is that humor is a gift from God, and like every other thing that he's given us, like every other sort of exercise of our mind, inability of our mind, it's given for a specific purpose, and that there are ways in which we can use it that glorify

God by a faithful proclamation of Christ to our neighbor, and there are ways we can use it that fail to do so.

And I think a lot of what the humor that people encounter in the world is a misuse of that gift in the same way that a lot of the strength that we see in this world is a misuse of the gift of strength manifested in violence and cruelty and things of that nature.

But yeah, so that there is a salutary use for this, and that we're using humor properly when we're using it in service of rightly proclaiming the gospel.

So I oftentimes encounter, every now and then we'll encounter folks who just kind of have this mindset, categorically, that it's never appropriate ever to make fun of anyone or anything ever, that making fun of things that people believe is sort of always out of bounds and unfair.

And it's certainly not, I think that kind of falls under the error of mistaking niceness for holiness, which tends to be a big error that's sort of embraced by a lot of American Christianity, where we assume that just kind of being polite and never wanting to hurt anyone's feelings is the same thing as actually loving them.

And that's certainly not the example that we see in the scriptures, where there's a lot of use of humor, there's a lot of use of snark, there's a lot of use of laughing and mockery at things that are contrary to what is true.

One of the things to me that's sort of funny about a lot of Christian stand -up comedy is

Christian stand -up comedy should be just absolutely filled with possibilities of really great ways to make people laugh and to find humor.

And so much of it, kind of oddly to me, focuses on this sort of minutiae of Christian American culture, so a lot of jokes about Chick -fil -A and stuff like that.

A lot of Southern culture. Right, yeah. For example, I remember a few months ago,

John Mulaney, the stand -up comedian, was hosting Saturday Night Live, and he had this monologue, and he talked in his monologue about having grown up Catholic and then marrying a

Jewish woman, and his mom, while they were engaged, talking about whether or not she would convert to Catholicism.

And John Mulaney had this big rant, and it was done in a very comedic fashion, about why it is that he thought

Catholicism was such a pathetic sales pitch to someone who is not a

Catholic. And I remember thinking about that, and just thinking what was so odd to me about it was that if you're a

Christian, that the sales pitch for Christianity is the greatest thing in the world, and the fact that someone wouldn't find it appealing, like the nature of unbelief, that you have salvation freely given to you, and it's not dependent upon your own work, and that God actually would forgive you all of your wickedness, and every awful thing that you've ever done is written out of existence, all of this stuff is the greatest sales pitch in the world, and yet people aren't sold on it.

Which just obviously shows the nature of unbelief, that if you can offer someone something that's objectively greater than what they have, and they'll still refuse it.

So there's a great opportunity to use humor in all sorts of ways there that would be very beneficial for, the

Church would be very beneficial for, in a sense of evangelism and things of that nature. So it's certainly something that I think people should be encouraged to follow, and not kind of settle for, like you said,

Southern culture, kind of like a Southern culture version of Garrison Keillor jokes about how Lutherans are humble, and bake casseroles, and just kind of lazy humor like that.

There's such a well to pull from there that I would love to see more people doing it.

I'm happy to kind of play a part in my own way, and certainly would love to see other people hop on board.

We have a listener who has a question. We have, let's see here,

I had it right in front of me just a moment ago. Oh, okay, here we go. We have

Robert in Westchester, New York, who says in Proverbs 17, verse 22, the very well known verse reads,

A merry heart does good like a medicine. Do you think that God was intending to teach us that laughter can actually be a healthy thing physically for us as human beings?

Well, I think that's certainly true. I think the merriness there,

I'd have to do a little bit more of a textual study to definitively say whether I think that's the right interpretation of what specifically is being prescribed there.

But as I was saying before, laughter is certainly a gift from God. I mean, the thing with humor is that when you're laughing at things that are, almost everything that we laugh at is something that's not the way that it's supposed to be.

That's really kind of the core of humor, is that almost all humor is rooted in the unexpected.

So when things aren't the way that they're supposed to be, we find that funny. And very oftentimes we find it funny out of a kind of sense of catharsis, that we're sort of laughing at the pain that we all kind of share from this.

But likewise, there's all kinds of other aspects of that, too. You know, as Christians, when we look out at our lives and we encounter suffering and hardship and despair, and this is kind of what

Luther was getting at when he was talking about farting in the general direction of the devil, is that you've already won.

You have victory in the blood of Jesus Christ. You have all of the salvation you could ever need placed into your hands as a free gift.

So all the devil's doing is he's just wailing and thrashing about like some petulant toddler trying to get you to hand over the salvation that Jesus has won for you.

So there's humor in it. We ought to laugh at the fact that the devil is... I mean,

I've preached about this before, in particular in the text from Revelation 12, of God casting

Satan out of his presence, and so you have the war with Michael and his angels, and Satan is cast down.

And I think the whole point of that is that the second that Satan becomes an accuser, the second that Christ forgives your sins and the devil starts accusing you of things that aren't true, when he calls you a sinner after Christ has forgiven you, then he's cast out of the devil's presence.

And so what does the devil do? Well, he comes down to earth and he tries to convince you not to believe, because he has to settle for you, because God won't listen to him anymore.

Now, there's humor in that. There's kind of a sense of how utterly pathetic and humiliated the devil is, and there's great humor in that.

And likewise, when we encounter suffering in this world, we laugh at it out of a sense of kind of a nervous laughter, because it gives us pain, and we know that this is not the way that things are supposed to be.

But there's kind of a beautiful divine message in that, that this is not what

God created you to be, that God didn't create you to suffer. He didn't create you to have your flesh be broken and fall apart.

He didn't create you so that you would be a slave to sin, but rather he created you to live with him forever. And on account of the blood of Jesus Christ, that's precisely what's going to happen to you.

So you have the freedom to laugh at everything that tries to take that away from you. I don't know if you're a fan of Babylon Bee.

I am. And we have Susan in Setauket, Long Island, New York, just sent me a Babylon Bee that announces

Joel Osteen's launching of his line of pastoral wear in sheep's clothing.

Yeah, that's pretty good. No, I do like the Babylon Bee. Stuff like that I think is great.

They lean in on the Chick -fil -A jokes pretty hard. So I would lovingly admonish them to try to take a bit of distance from that.

It's just too much of Garrison Keillor -esque humor for me. But stuff like that I think is quite marvelous.

Well, I loved every minute of our interview today. I hope you shared my enjoyment.

I did, yes. I would love to have you back on the program. I want to make sure our listeners be ready to write this down for the website of River of Life Lutheran Church in Shenahan, Illinois.

It's R -O -L -Shenahan .org. R -O -L -C -H -A -N -N -A -H -O -N .org.

And, of course, don't forget about the Lutheran Satire website. And that website is, and I just had it in front of me.

Why don't you tell us what the website is, because I've disappeared from my screen. Sure, yeah. It's LutheranSatire .org.

And then on YouTube, I think it's YouTube .com slash, I think it's TheLutheranSatire. But, yeah, you'll find all the videos and whatnot on LutheranSatire .org,

including the new video that I just put out today. So give that one a listen as well. Great. Well, I want to thank you.

If you could hold on, I want to say a proper goodbye to you off the air. I want to thank everybody who listened today, especially those who took the time to write.

And I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.