Truthscript: Why Men Think About the Roman Empire

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00:32
Welcome, welcome, welcome to another TruthScript Tuesday on a Wednesday.
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That's right.
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We have three articles to talk about today from the TruthScript website.
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The first one is by my brother, actually, David Harris.
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And the title of it is, Do I need to think more about the Roman Empire? And this is, for those who don't know, playing off of the recent craze online, I guess, even my wife came and asked me, do you think about the Roman Empire? And how often do you think about it if you do? And the idea is that supposedly men think about the Roman Empire more than women.
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Or they actually think about the Roman Empire and women don't.
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And I told her, I said, yeah, a few times a week, I do think about the Roman Empire.
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And she thought that was the craziest thing.
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And a number of women have gone through a similar situation with their spouses or boyfriends or husbands.
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And they're wondering why their men in their lives or their fathers or whoever thinks about the Roman Empire.
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And I said, you know, I think about, like, colonial American history, though, and Civil War history.
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And I think about other things.
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I mean, it's not just like the Roman Empire.
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I think about other things just about as much.
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I think about medieval times and knights, probably about as much as the Roman Empire.
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But yeah, I mean, I do think about the Roman Empire.
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So what's up with that? Why do men do that? So the first article we have today is about that very thing and examining this social phenomenon that we are now starting to realize that men seem to think more about the Roman Empire.
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So the article starts like this Hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you.
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And then there's another quote, I came, I saw I conquered a third quote, Rome wasn't built in a day and a fourth quote, all roads lead to Rome.
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These are common catchphrases that you'll hear in your normal daily life.
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We reference it frequently, but only in the odd oscillating space of viral social media.
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We have ever paid so much attention to the Roman Empire.
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Indeed, people all over the world have been thinking about this old world over the past few weeks.
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This is all this all started with a social media trend, which I just explained.
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It's worth spending a moment to dwell on this.
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Why and how has this trend emerged? It would be easy to figuratively flick the screen and play the next video.
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But upon further examination, this phenomenon requires more attention.
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Now, I will say this, the Gospel Coalition this past week decided it was very important to ask the question whether or not it's sinful to say mean things to Siri or Alexa, AI.
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You know, that's that's wrong if you're mistreating them and that kind of thing.
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So cutting edge stuff right there.
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But I will submit to you that this is much more of an important question in my mind, at least.
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The article goes on.
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It says this.
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Usually the main reason such topics go viral is because we tend to find random things funny.
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The more abstract the topic, the more humorous the hits for many seeing a reaction to how often do you think about the Roman Empire demonstrates either how disconnected a man's thoughts are from the current time or in some more positive instances, the depths of his great intelligence.
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If a man's response is the Roman, what then we know that he is missing a substantial amount of historical knowledge and context.
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In some ways, it's a good test of how deeply he thinks and how aware he is about the events that brought him to the moment he's currently in.
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Likewise, there's also an element of mockery.
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If a woman asks her man how often he thinks about robes, armor and epic battles in the Mediterranean, it can also be to make fun of how seemingly random or irrelevant his thoughts are.
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So you have an option here, right? It's either very good or it's very bad, but men tend to think about the Roman Empire.
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They're either really smart or they're just totally irrelevant and disconnected from our present time.
04:41
As with most cultural events and trends, there's opportunity to bring the Christian view of things into the conversation using the discussion around the Roman Empire can be a conversation starter to introduce the good news of Christ to someone.
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Here are a few good reasons to think about Julius Caesar, Pax Romana and even plebeians a bit more.
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So I will submit that this is much more important than whether or not I probably should stop making fun of it, whether or not you sin against your AI device when you say something a little rude or disrespectful, because this this is an actual I think truly an actual opportunity to share with people if the topic comes up in your normal day to day, whether that's on social media or in the normal course of life.
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And we need to be probably mindful of these things because these opportunities actually present themselves quite often.
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And I'll confess that I often don't think about it.
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It often goes over my head or I don't know, maybe I'm thinking about the Roman Empire too much, but I don't realize, oh, wow, there is a deep connection there between Christianity and a current topic.
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And that can be used as a bridge.
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So Hosea 4, 6 says my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
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It's often used to press the need for a historical understanding of current events.
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Without the knowledge of what has come before, how can we properly understand what's currently going on? Without this knowledge, how can we be ready for what is going to happen next? The Roman Empire was a juncture in world history primarily because that's when God saw fit to send his son for our redemption.
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Without a rudimentary comprehension of the events of his time, it will be hard to draw the lines that are needed to understand what God is doing through the course of the history we're all a part of.
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Moreover, without some knowledge of the Roman Empire, large sections of scripture will be harder to understand.
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Daniel 2 and 7, for example, including very specific historical context that makes a lot more sense when one understands the events and epochs being addressed.
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When Paul is talking to the Epicureans and Stoics on Mars Hill in Acts 17, a more thorough understanding of the philosophical movements that were operating before and during the Roman Empire makes the reading of Paul's sermons that much more hard-hitting.
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A historical understanding of the theological questions and debates, even those that are raging today, is crucial.
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The early church operated with a distinct political and cultural context.
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Hence, regardless of which continent a church was on, it usually was within the borders of the Roman Empire.
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To correctly understand the ins and outs of early church theology, knowing the history of what was going on here is immensely helpful.
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This is not to say that historical context is everything in interpreting scripture, but it definitely helps.
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And then finally, the article closes with a note about providence, that God chose to send Christ in a period of Roman history in which we call it the Pax Romana, in which his word would have been spread.
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And it's because of the connectivity of that world, the political system that encouraged that kind of activity for economic reasons.
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And it says that there was stability in that time as well.
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And this allowed Christian churches to flourish, although persecution ebbed and flowed.
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It's no coincidence that God's plan of salvation spread like wildfire through the Roman Empire.
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It's a very exciting time in world history.
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And it's also the time God purposely chose to spread the good news about Christ across all the earth.
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So there's a book recommended here.
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I have not read it.
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I've seen it, though.
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I think my father has it, Borderland, Israel in the Time of Jesus, sold at the Creation Museum by Answers in Genesis.
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And it talks about some of these things.
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Now, I will say this about the Roman Empire.
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I think there's something else going on here.
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And, you know, it was maybe touched on a little bit in this, but I would if I was writing this article, I might focus on it more.
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And this is just a theory because I don't know if this is true.
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But I do think that there's some kind of a hunger that especially young men have, but all men really for honor and valor and just the cavalier, the knight, the Roman centurion and the fighting for the glory of something beyond yourself and in our very atomistic age of autonomous individuals that are disconnected from one another.
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And that scene is a good thing to some extent, pursuing their own interests and whatever the market provides for them.
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There's an attraction to something that is beyond them that would bind them with other men together for the pursuit of a common objective.
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You see this all the time online with a lot of the memes and Twitter culture, I suppose, that they'll start off saying something like, I mean, me and the boys, and then it's a scenario.
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This is what me and the boys and oftentimes I wonder whether the people who put those memes out there actually have friends in the local area that they're doing things like that with, like if it's me and the boys swimming because it's summer or something.
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Are they actually doing that or is that a hunger? Is that on social media saying this is what we wish we could be doing, but my friends now are in other places, they're not near me and I hunger for that because I feel isolated.
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And I think that thinking about the Roman Empire is yearning for a sense of solidarity and getting away from that kind of isolation.
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But that's that's another angle, maybe for another time.
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But I think that this article does a good job in actually letting us know that there's an opportunity here.
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And I don't know if the discussion is and maybe it's tapering out a little bit now.
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I think it was a week ago.
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I mean, that's how Internet things go.
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Right.
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And actually, it's one of the things I told my wife, I said, I mean, I kind of have to think about the Roman Empire, because if I'm reading the Bible, how often is the Roman Empire reference? So any Christian should be thinking about the Roman Empire if they're in touch with the New Testament or even parts of the Old Testament.
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The next article is from Danny Steinmeier.
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It's called You Win Some, You Lose Some, You Win Some, You Lose Some.
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And there's an interesting photo here on the front for those listening.
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I think it's from the Lego movie.
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It's the spaceman with a very, I guess, dire look on his face.
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Article starts like this.
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If you're like me, you have heard the evangelical call for winsomeness in our witness.
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Have you all heard that? I've heard that.
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Tim Keller, I think, started to change short towards the end of his life.
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And instead of saying winsomeness quite as much, he started using the word compelling.
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But he meant, I think, the same thing.
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Once words are made fun of, you know, like woke, the left has to shift.
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Right.
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Or it's not just unique to the left.
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Anyone has to shift.
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Some don't, though.
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Some, you know, they're vilified and they just they wear that.
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And there's some some good to that.
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But anyways, the article goes on and says, but what does it mean to be winsome in the first place? My theology professor in college taught us that theology is the business of defining your terms.
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Winsome means generally pleasing and engaging, often because of a childlike charm and innocence.
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Another dictionary says sweetly or innocently charming.
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The picture that is painted for us is of a neutral world or of a world that has been the victim of mean and cranky, negative Nellie's.
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And it's the fault of those sourpuss even fundamentalists.
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I don't know.
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Was that evangelical? They're fundamentalists.
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It seems we're always trying to escape the dark shadow of those darn fundamentalists.
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Anyway, the diagnosis inside our camp is that we are not effectively winning the world for Christ, in part because we don't smile enough, because we're presenting a negative vision of the world by our ever growing list of things that we're against.
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The remedy for our supposed evangelical crankiness is the charm of childlike innocence and sweetness.
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Perhaps you've heard the refrain from some of your local pastors or politicians.
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We need to be known for what we are for, not what we are against.
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I hate that line.
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I'm just personal note here.
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I hate that line.
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I've heard it so many times and often it is brought by people who are willing to cave on their convictions at the first opportunity.
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Not all the time, but often.
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It's a modern proverb that resonates with many and is the go to play for a winsome evangelical witness.
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But is this play the one that God is running? Is this the persona that God wants to be known for? The prominence of the negative.
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I'm currently preaching through the book of Exodus.
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I've told our people that we may never leave the law in chapter 20.
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It is wonderful and we are growing in our worshipful understanding of God and his relationship to us.
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Before preaching through Exodus, though, I preach through the book of First Corinthians.
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And in these two books, a huge, bright billboard is shining in the face of the winsomeness narrative.
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In Exodus, when God gives the law to Israel, he puts on a tremendous show of holy awesomeness.
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The ground is quaking.
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There is a loud sound of a trumpet blast.
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The mountain is covered in a cloud of thick smoke filled with lightning flashes.
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And when God speaks, his voice is literally thunderous.
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We forget that the Ten Commandments were first delivered by the fearful voice of God before they were written by the finger of God.
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And when the deliverers of the word of his law, eight of the ten are presented in the negative.
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Interesting thought.
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God's law is often in the negative.
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That's true.
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For those of you in Riolinda, I think Rush Limbaugh was the one who said that all the time.
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Riolinda.
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It's the only time I ever heard that.
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Anyway, for those of you in Riolinda, that means 80 percent of the law.
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It's about what not to do.
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God's holiness agenda for his people starts with you shall have no and continues with seven.
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You shall not fourth and fifth commandments are the only two presented with written on stone tablets in the positive.
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But even the fourth commandment includes what Israel is not to do, namely to do any work on the Sabbath Sabbath.
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Apparently, God wasn't worried about a lack of winsomeness or positivity in the community survey.
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And if evangelicals weren't so antinomian, you might get the impression of a bait and switch strategy.
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But I digress.
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But in case you think God flips the script of the New Testament, where God's people are known for the positive quality of love.
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First Corinthians 13 should clear things up for you.
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Starting in verse four, we have the description of what love is like in action.
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And you probably have memorized it.
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Did you realize that love is described seven times positively? But did you notice that it's also known for what it is not in nine different ways? So I'm going to let those who are interested in this article read it for themselves.
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It's a very good article.
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Danny Steinmeier is a great writer.
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He's on the board for truth script.
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But he, he may, he continues to make the point that this understanding of the negativity of God's law.
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In other words, the things you're not supposed to do is essential for understanding even the gospel, because you must have an understanding of the law first.
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That you have violated the law of God in some way.
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And so the good news doesn't make sense if you don't know that you haven't violated something.
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It's only good news when the negative news is really negative.
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Now he talks about, and I like this at the end, he says, heading our brand.
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He says, the Christian witness in the world is that we have to come to join the family of God by grace in Christ, where we are now against what our father is against.
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And we are for what he is for.
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We preach the message of sin.
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We are anti-abortion.
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We are anti-homosexual sexuality.
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We are anti-mutilating children, et cetera.
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So, so one of the things that he says, we're happy in the Lord, you know, he says that there are positive things here, but, but here's the thing.
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You, you all live in a time, everyone listening to my voice right now, in which we live in a very anti-Christian world.
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Increasingly so.
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And that's been going on for our entire lifetime.
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I don't care how old you are.
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You've seen that March.
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And I think because of that, we have way more opportunities to be against things and way more obligations to be against things because things are just put in our lap.
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The government intrudes into the church, private businesses that maybe aren't so private anymore, but corporations and so forth.
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They influence your family in ways that are very negative, pushing in agendas that you have to be able to train your children against.
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How are you going to do it? If you keep telling yourself, well, we have to be known about what we're for and not what we're against.
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How about don't worry about how men know you? Instead, as a Christian, just be concerned about what God thinks of you and whether you're fulfilling your obligation to him, which includes supporting his law.
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Even the negative aspects of it.
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So if God's law is against homosexuality, to pick a very hot topic here and through the whole month of June in every avenue that you have to the outside world, that agenda is being pushed on you and your family.
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You have a duty to respond.
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And the response is not simply that you reinforce things about marriage and heterosexual marriage and fidelity, which you should.
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It has to also be drawing a line and saying that's not, though, what that's not what we are for.
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That is that that doesn't belong in the same category as this good thing God's made.
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So I think that's part of the just the landscape we live in because of how the world has changed so much in a very short period of time.
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Last article here is from Troy Skinner.
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He's written for us before, and the title is How the State Promotes Morality According to the Reformers.
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And I would love to know I should probably know where this picture was taken at the front.
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It's a castle church of some kind.
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It looks like it's it's almost I don't know, I don't know, Germany or I don't know, England.
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I should probably know the architecture differences between those places, maybe more England, more England.
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But anyway, someone will probably correct me on that.
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The question, how should the church and state relate is of utmost importance, thus the subject of heated debate.
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Looking at the Protestant history, particularly the political philosophy of two giants in the Christian faith, we will be instructed in our context today.
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Now, he talks about two Martin Luther and John Calvin.
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Those are probably the two most prominent reformers, magisterial reformers, no doubt about it.
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And so he looks at Luther's book or writing on the secular authority and Calvin's Institutes of the Christian religion for this.
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And so he starts with Martin Luther.
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Martin Luther was particularly dependent on the protection of civil authorities because the Roman Catholic Church was calling for his head.
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Many would argue the state retained too much influence on the church.
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But Luther was careful to push back against this notion by asserting that liberty and equality were fundamental to Christianity, even that both ought to remain untouched by any earthly authority.
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The government of the state and the government of the church were to remain distinct, according to Luther.
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He didn't argue for theocracy, but neither did he argue for a complete separation of church and state.
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And I think in the Lutheran context, they say they call, if I'm not mistaken, it's the three estates where Kuyperians kind of draw these spheral authorities, that's the term they use.
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But in Luther, I think it's the three estates.
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I think and I believe it's government, family and church, if I'm not mistaken.
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Luther believed the state should be busy about the work of maintaining peace, right, enforcing laws.
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That function wasn't to be controlled by the church, but Christians were to be involved in it.
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To prevent chaos, Luther would say it's sometimes necessary to use force, but the power to wield force belongs to the state, not the church.
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So Luther has a two kingdom view, everything is subject to the will of God and the God's moral law.
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If a state violates God's law, then the state law is to be ignored or overturned.
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Luther stressed the importance of having godly, wise and reasonable state leaders who do the right thing.
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Luther's legal freedom, one may suggest that state law doesn't apply to Christians because true Christians are going to abide in God's moral law by virtue of being Christian.
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The problem, of course, is there's a short supply of true Christians and far too many counterfeit Christians.
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So it's only for real Christians that state law could ever even hypothetically be irrelevant.
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The real Christians have their own way of governing themselves, as outlined in the New Testament.
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Hence, true Christians shouldn't always resort to the authority of the state government when dealing with one another.
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True Christians also shouldn't sue each other in court, for example.
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This is one of the things too, a little aside here, not to weigh in too deep into the Christian nationalist debate or the cultural Christian debate.
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But there is an acknowledgement, even among the most ardent Christian nationalists, that the civil society will always be composed of a mixture of people, Christians and non-Christians.
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And so it'd be nice to think that you could live in a state of society in which the people that were being governed have a certain level of morality.
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And I think we had a very high level of morality at the foundation of the United States, and that's part of the reason our Constitution works.
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But self-government starts to break down when people follow their vice instead of their virtues.
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And so there's an acknowledgement that different forms of government are going to be suited for different situations.
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And there will never be a situation in which you have 100% Bible-believing Christians focused on doing the right thing.
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That just doesn't exist.
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So you have to have laws that are suited from God to a population that includes sinners.
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If a true Christian should find himself in a position of leadership, according to Luther, he should judge in accordance with love, for then you will distinguish and decide all things easily without law books.
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But if you remove the law of God, of love and of nature, you notice he said nature there, by the way, just a quick aside.
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I know there's a little bit of an online debate right now about natural law and so forth.
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But, you know, and I've I mean, I'm really weighing into the controversies.
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This isn't fair to Troy.
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I'm not putting words in his mouth, but I feel like I should say it.
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You know, I read a lot of Greg Bonson.
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I've been very influenced by him.
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And he and others like Michael Butler and even Van Til were pretty aggressively against natural law.
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And so they would believe they would sometimes I even use the phrase natural revelation just to sidestep that.
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But natural law doesn't have to necessarily be a bad thing.
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And you'll see things in the reformers writings.
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Here's one of them, the law of love and nature, where it sounds like people who are really adamant against Thomas Aquinas could say, wait a minute, that's that's that's scholasticism.
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That's a Thomas Aquinas or something.
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Well, it's what everyone who was of any note at that time would have believed.
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It's not unique to Thomas Aquinas or anything like that.
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But anyway, you will never hit on what is pleasing to God.
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Good judgment is not to be found in books, but free from good sense.
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I'll say one more thing about that, too, because I know that there's probably going to be people who have questions about it, and maybe we'll talk about that on my other podcast, Conversations That Matter.
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But natural law never can contradict what the Bible teaches.
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Right.
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And it's the I mean, the idea is that people are have certain instincts from creation.
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That might even be good.
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The father who gives his son a fish instead of a snake.
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These are good things, earthly good.
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That guy, it doesn't mean that this achieves the favor of God in an internal sense at all, but but but they function.
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People will function oftentimes according to a nature that is influenced by the image of God in that way.
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And so it's not it's not a spark of goodness as the Armenians or it would say or Quakers or even Roman Catholics or it's not that because it doesn't achieve the favor of God.
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It's just an acknowledgment that there is this instinctual understanding that a law exists.
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It's from God.
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You're wired to know that you're violating it at times, and some people suppress that and go deeper into their sin.
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But other people, the moral and righteous will they're still unrighteous.
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They're not thanking God.
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Right.
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But they are still operating in a way that seeks to as best as they know how in their darkened state, follow God's law.
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So so natural law is really simply this idea that there are laws laid down by God from creation that people know are right and wrong.
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And and this is something that they don't have to be doesn't have to be instructed to them necessarily.
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This is something that God's wired into them to some extent.
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So that doesn't mean it provides a solid basis for producing an entire Christian society or anything like that.
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But it certainly does help in showing that even civilizations that did not have Christianity had certain rules against things like stealing and lying and, you know, or murder and adultery.
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And why is that? Why is that? You have to account for it.
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Anyway, I do digress.
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John Calvin, a key figure in the development of the Protestant Reformation, had a higher view of the public office compared to Luther.
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So Calvin saw two distinct kingdoms playing different roles.
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The eternal kingdom of God related to spiritual matters and the temporal kingdoms of man related to political matters.
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These earthly kingdoms had been set in place by God to provide civil order.
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And the more civil order there is, the better it is for God's church.
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Agreeing with Luther, Calvin said Christians are to subject themselves to the rule of earthly leaders so long as it's not in conflict with God's law.
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The two agree that secular leaders are to be just and fair.
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Calvin structures his arguments in more ordinary fashion than Luther does, though.
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He breaks down the structures of civil government into three categories.
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Rulers rule the rules and the ruled.
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He discusses various forms of government structure, favoring aristocracy because it seems to strike the best balance for a fallen world.
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A balance between the sinful authoritarian dictates of one man on one end and the sinful mob mentality on the other.
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Here's where Calvin and Luther disagree.
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The overlapping of Luther and Calvin's positions can be obscured by differences.
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There's also a tonality difference.
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Luther's rhetoric tends to have a ring of a cannonball blasting.
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Calvin is more akin to the sound of a cannonball loudly slashing in the sea.
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Literary structure and tonality aren't the only difference, though.
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Departing from Luther, Calvin believed it was appropriate for a Christian to bring his Christian brother to court to resolve their disputes.
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Calvin emphasized the need for brotherly love to be maintained through the process, but said that failing to make use of the court system was to reject an ordinance of God.
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The key was to avoid embarking on some vengeful quest, but to maintain love as the motivation of the heart.
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If going to court causes love to be lost between the brothers, then the Christian should give up his right to preserve love.
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Calvin said, and this is a quote from Calvin, The governors of a free people ought to employ all their efforts in seeing to it that the people's freedom, whose protectors they are, suffers no, man, I can't say this word, diminution, diminution of any sort under their rule.
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I mean, it just means, I think, to make less of.
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If the state authorities should fail to do this, then believers are to go to the Lord in prayer and supplication, willing to suffer exile before entering into personal rebellion.
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So agree or disagree with these giants of church history, their thoughtful instruction at least provides a historical perspective for Christ followers today.
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And I would say that this is a great article for people who are involved in this Christian nationalist debate.
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It really is, because it gives you a historical perspective, which I think we're badly in need of, understanding, OK, what and it's not just the reformers, but the reformers are certainly a key part of Protestant history.
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What did they believe about church state relationships? And of course, they believed that the state should be governed by Christian morality and not just Christian morality.
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In Luther's time and in Calvin's time, they would not have conceived of it apart from also a Christian identity of sorts, that those who served in government were not serving in a neutral institution composed of people with all kinds of religious beliefs that were able to maintain those religious beliefs while equally serving the greater good somehow.
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That that's not even a possibility in their minds.
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They lived at a time when the state had to make a choice at that time between mostly between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, or in some cases they had they had other they had Muslims on the borders.
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They had Jewish people within their boundaries.
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And so the state had to take firm stands in all these things.
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And and so they would have been fine with the government encouraging true religion.
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And that's something that we've definitely gotten away from.
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People will take.
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In fact, I think I have on my shelf somewhere.
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I don't know which shelf it's on, but not readily available.
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I have a a book about John Calvin, though, and how he was essentially one of the founding fathers of the United States.
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The book's trying to argue that based upon some of the things you actually just read, that the state guarantees the freedoms of individuals and individual freedom is what the Protestant Reformation was about.
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And that created America.
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And I think it's fairly oversimplified of a reading and it's kind of a flat reading.
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But but many will will look back to today, look back to Calvin, who are in that reformed Protestant tradition and say, this is where we got our liberal democracy.
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Right.
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And in reality, though, you know, Calvin Calvin would have been against that.
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There's certain ideas that he has that you can certainly say developed and you can take them and say this is you can see modern incarnations or developments of those, I suppose, iterations that.
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But they but they don't have all the ingredients that Calvin would have had.
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And so it's important to go back and look at the ingredients Calvin and Luther thought would make for a well-functioning society.
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And certainly a state that was under Christian influence was a Christian state essentially was a good thing to them.
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So that's just history.
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That's not an opinion one way or the other.
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It's just this is what we have in our history.
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Disagree or agree.
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So appreciate that from Troy Skinner and parsing that out.
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More work can be done in this area.
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I hope he'll write more or someone else will write more on this.
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That's it for today.
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And so that's why we have the style guide.
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Doing events, that kind of thing, sponsoring events, contribute, contribute.
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True script dot com is where you go to see all of that.
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And I appreciate all of you next Tuesday.
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I will see you again.
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God bless.