Addressing the Moscow Mood | Doug Wilson & Sean DeMars

Welcome to this April edition of Doug and Friends. It is a, this is Doug. Hi. And we're the

Friends. This is a special edition of Doug and Friends because we have a new friend. This is Sean DeMars from the

Room for Nuance podcast. Also has another Defend and Confirm. You do a couple podcasts, right? Yeah, that's right. Okay, so one is for conservatives, the other one's for liberals.

Okay, that's right. You're just hitting everybody, right? That's the truly third way. And Sean actually is gonna be here to to ask the questions.

So this is your rodeo, man. So you're gonna, you're gonna light it up here. This is both programs.

It's a mosh pit of talk shows. It's a Moscow mosh pit. Yeah, that's right. Look at that. That's right.

So on the Room for Nuance, first of all, thank you guys. On the Room for Nuance podcast, we like to be a little pharisaical.

Okay. We like to start off with prayer, if that's okay. Just ask for the Lord's help for a productive conversation. Brother, would you pray for us?

Happy to do it. Father, we're grateful for your kindness and faithfulness to us. We want this conversation to be edifying and fruitful, so grant us grace to have sharp minds and go where you would want us to.

In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. Which is not pharisaical, because it wasn't a lengthy prayer. That's right, it was very brief.

I did not pile up any words. God is in heaven, you are on earth, therefore let your words be few. That's right. There you go. Let's start off with the most important question.

Which race is your least favorite? Okay. Which race? Mine. Mine is a 5k.

Okay, that's well played. What were you guys thinking? Well played. All right, everybody all loose?

All right, here we go. To start off with some scripture, Ephesians chapter 4, verses 1 through 3.

You guys know it well, but do we know it? Right, do we really know this? Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, and with all humility and gentleness and patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the

Spirit and the bond of peace. I wanted to start here because I think that apart from the

Moscow mood question, which we're gonna get to in a minute, I do think you brothers have an eagerness to maintain unity.

Some people may disagree with the strategy that you have chosen in order to accomplish that, but I see a desire for Catholicity in you brothers, like true

Catholicity that I admire, and evidence of that is that we're having this conversation now. So yeah.

Okay, so let's start off with some encouragement, then let's go to some points of agreement, and then we'll get all wrapped around the axle on some of the more contentious stuff.

Okay, so an encouragement. Joe, this is gonna be heavily aimed at Doug, but I'm so thankful that you're here.

Brother, I just wanted to just highlight different ways that the Lord has used you in your ministry to strengthen my faith.

So I just want to go all the way back with the collision debates. Okay. I mean, seeing you go toe -to -toe with Christopher Hitchens at the time when new atheism was on the rise, and to, in many ways, to my view, get the best of him because you were standing on the

Word of God, it was just so formative for me as a young Christian. I was coming out of the prosperity gospel,

I was becoming Reformed, I was wrestling with all kinds of questions, and here's this small -town pastor from Idaho who's, like, crushing this intellectually elite guy, and it was just really useful.

Easy chairs, hard words. Yeah. I still give that book away. I just think it's one of the best books that I can give to someone in the pew to help them understand and believe the doctrines of grace.

We're gonna come back to that book here in a little bit. I've benefited greatly from not only your writing ministry, but the writing ministry of your children, you know,

Indy Wilson, my daughter, found out that we were gonna be here, and she was like, are you gonna get to meet the guy who wrote the cupboards books, and all of that stuff, and then your willingness to apply all of Christ to all of life, you know,

Christian education, though I may not agree with your political prescriptions across the board, just your desire to see the gospel applied to all of life.

Brother, so thankful for it. Well, thank you, thank the Lord. Yeah, yeah. And Joe, nice hair.

Thanks. Yeah, you know, I worked hard at it. And then I just wanted to highlight some points of agreement, because we're gonna talk about some disagreements, but the most important thing about us is what we have in common as first -order issues, and I think we have a lot in common.

So I wanted to just start with the five solas, you know, because I think within the five solas, you have reformed soteriology, the trustworthiness and sufficient nature of Scripture, the uniqueness of Christ and salvation.

If it was faith, grace, and all that stuff without the alone, I don't know if that would be true, but it's grace alone, faith alone,

Christ alone, the authority of Scripture alone, the glory of God alone. So you brothers heartily affirm all of the five solas.

Amen to all of that. That's right. Now, when we get to talking about federal vision stuff here in a minute, which we don't have to hang out on for too long,

I think this will come back up again. Yeah. Then just some other points of agreement. So complementarianism and not squishy complementarianism.

I mean, I think complementarianism doesn't really matter unless it's thick, unless you can build a house on it, you know?

Pro -life. Yeah. I don't know if we'd agree on like the abolitionism versus incrementalism question, maybe we can talk about that.

Opposition to all manifestations of LGBTQ stuff while trying to love them in that sin and confusion.

I think you brothers would agree with me that wokeness is wicked. Yeah. Shouldn't have any place in the church.

Right. Okay. So on and so forth. Okay. So there we go. Now, to getting to some of the disagreements,

I feel like I'm just talking a lot. Is there anything you guys want to say? No, you're setting it up very nicely. I'm fine.

I'm great. Okay. I wanted to give you guys a little bit of my perspective on how

I have sort of shifted away from Moscow over the years. Ten, twelve, yeah, ten or twelve years ago, people have been disagreeing with you guys forever, but I always found myself being like the

Doug Wilson or the Moscow or the Canon Press apologist, you know? Like, man, they're so bold, they're so brave, they're so wise, they're so careful, they're writing about things and tackling things that other people aren't or won't or whatever.

Don't be in an echo chamber, all of that stuff. But what it felt like happened to me, especially over the last seven years of me being a pastor, is it felt like death by a thousand cuts.

It felt like, okay, well, I don't agree with what he said about certain aspects of chattel slavery in the

United States, but he says all this other good stuff. And then it was, well, yeah, I don't agree with theonomy, you know, but there's all this other good stuff.

And no, federal vision, you know, I'm not even sure I really understand it, but from what I do understand of it,

I don't really know. And yeah, I did see that article where he used the

C word, you know. So it just, it felt like after a while, I just could no longer have the same kind of enthusiasm and vigor in defending, promoting, giving away resources from you guys.

Not that you need me to do that, but I'm just trying to share my perspective with you on kind of how

I got to where I've gotten in my relationship with Moscow. So here's an additional factor.

Okay. And that is, you mentioned before you were pastor, you're just one of the guys talking to people about things you find helpful.

Yeah. And if you're one of the guys, people sort and share things out. If you talk that way to a parishioner, and they agree with you in disagreeing with something

I said or did, and you say, yeah, but they do a lot of good stuff, they're gonna hold you personally responsible as their pastor for that.

That's right. Instead of being up and down the pew, they're gonna say, oh, is he secretly, he said he disagrees with that, but does he really?

So basically, you've got additional responsibilities as a pastor to shepherd these people.

I had the same challenge back in the day with the Reconstructionists, because during the 80s,

I was vacuuming up what they were teaching, because although I differed with a number of things that they said, they were the only ones who were trying to apply the

Bible to everything. And I was hungry for that. But I couldn't, as a pastor,

I couldn't just distribute their books freely. Oh really? So you weren't giving out

Gary North? I was not. I was taking a lot of Gary North in. I was reading a lot of Rush Dooney, but I wasn't in a position to say, here, let's cover the book table with these guys.

Because I didn't have a big enough pastoral filter to go around and catch all the things that people would be picking up.

Either people who thought that I agreed with that particular thing and went along with it, and I was going, ah!

Or they disagreed with it strongly and assumed that I must agree with it, or must have a secret affinity.

So I feel your pain. Thanks, man. Man, that was some empathy right there, guys. I just feel like...

Tell him how he's in sin. I also say, though, you should just know what you articulated there in terms of the death by a thousand cuts, you're not the only one.

I'd say there's a good number of people who are probably in that same boat. So how do you respond to someone who says that to you?

I love you guys, but it's just too much. So I would say dial back the dose.

I find this helpful, but I didn't find that helpful. Well, read the helpful stuff.

Basically, we appreciate it when someone out there understands all of our jokes and understands all of the things we say and is prepared to go to the wall.

No, they're great. They're great, and I'll defend everything. Yeah, that's great. I appreciate that.

But I also am not delusional, and I don't see why on earth someone across the country who hasn't talked to me about a bunch of these things would automatically sign off on my thinking when they haven't heard it.

So I know that there are people out there, I know there are good pastors out there who hate the sound of Doug Wilson's name because there's a fan boy of mine in the congregation that comes up and says, what you said in the sermon, that third point, that's not what

Doug Wilson says. Basically, that's not helpful, and I get it.

So one of this is probably going to come up later, but what we're talking about is a problem that is created by mass communication.

Okay? If we're having a conversation like this, Paul says to the Galatians, I wish

I could be there in person so I could change my tone. I can read your reactions,

I can adjust what I'm saying, and we can really get somewhere. Personal conversations accomplish a lot, right?

But in mass communication, when you're writing for tens of thousands of people, it's a statistics game, right?

You can't adjust for, let's say 15 % aren't going to get the joke or they're going to be offended by something, and I can adjust for them, but now

I'm turning off 65 % who say, what, did somebody get dug onto his meds?

What happened? So you have to look at the target audience, who you're writing for, okay?

And back in the late 80s, and I've not changed since that time, back in the late 80s,

I decided that my target audience, when I'm writing, I'm writing for an evangelical who is distressed at everything he sees falling apart all around him, is worried that it's him.

Am I going crazy? Am I going crazy? I don't like this at all. And then he gets something

I wrote, and he says, it's not me. I couldn't put my finger on it, but that's what

I've been worried about. So that's the person that I care the most about reaching.

The person who's beleaguered, outnumbered, his session, his writing, his case over different things.

He wishes that they didn't have women doing the scripture reading, you know, whatever the thing is in their church.

And I'm writing, I write to be a lifeline to that guy.

And if I'm reaching that guy, mission accomplished. If I'm turning off somebody who's hostile from the get -go,

I don't worry about it. If I lose somebody who could have been persuaded if I was their next door neighbor and they knew me personally,

I'm sad about that, sorry about that. But I'm not going to abandon the cohort that I'm writing for.

Because I decided a long time ago, that cohort is huge. That cohort that I write for has been utterly abandoned by the evangelical leadership, and there's no one to speak for them.

Yeah. So let's talk about one of the bigger cuts of the thousand cuts, there's not quite a thousand, obviously, but I get this one a lot from Presbyterians.

They're pretty adamant here about the federal vision stuff. Monergism .com, back when it was hard to find good reform books, and that was one of the few places you could do it, they used to have like a warning next to the

Easy Chairs, Hard Words book that said, we love Douglas Wilson's book here, it's so helpful, despite his heresy.

And they don't, I mean, they're not heterodoxy, heresy.

Which is a weird thing to do, by the way. Sell the book anyways.

Why would you sell the book anyway? That doesn't sound like someone who really believes it.

They need to put some distance or daylight, so that people will lay off. They have to call it a harsh name.

But you're still selling the book? Yeah. There's a John Piper clip from many moons ago with him, and I think

Matt Chandler and Mark Driscoll, where your name comes up, and the federal vision stuff comes up.

And he says he listened to all of the recordings of a trial, or whatever you went through about that.

And he said, I listened very carefully, and to me, it sounds exactly like the kind of error

I would expect a Presbyterian to make, but it does not sound heretical. Right. For someone who's not still quite sure that I understand federal vision, could you help me understand what

John Piper means by that? Yeah, you might be able to help more on that.

I think, so John is assiduous in his attentiveness. That's the language he would use.

He pays very careful attention and tries to understand people on their own terms, and to read charitably, and for understanding and clarity.

And so what he means is, as a Baptist, he recognizes that Doug's going to say things like, there are

Christians and there are Christians, meaning there are external Christians and there are internal Christians. There's a visible church, and there's an invisible church.

And this is a classic Presbyterian reformed distinction, right? And so a lot of the stuff that's working out of the federal vision is working out sort of the meaning of, what does it mean to have inside Christians and outside Christians?

To have a visible church and an invisible church, and for the visible church to be an objective reality that God recognizes and that matters, okay?

And so as a Baptist, he goes, he doesn't want to have it work quite that way, because he doesn't have infant baptism, he's not going to emphasize the objectivity of that covenant in the same way, or the continuity between the old and the new in the same way.

So he's saying, I've got all kinds of Baptist reasons why I would disagree with Doug, but I think

I'm just disagreeing with a Presbyterian who means it. And that's as to be expected.

And many Baptists, and I did when I was a Baptist, thought that paedocommunion, the thing that really sticks in many

Presbyterians' craw, Baptists think paedocommunion is consistent.

It just makes sense. It makes good sense. So John Piper is not going to be freaked out by paedocommunion.

He's going to wonder why all the rest of you guys aren't doing that. So if I were to put my finger on the sore spot,

Joe just touched on it, the sore spot in the whole federal vision thing would be the objectivity of the covenant.

So it's not just internal Christian, the kind of Christian who goes to heaven when he dies.

A true Jew is not one who is one outwardly, but one inwardly, circumcised in the heart by the Spirit.

Someone baptized by the Spirit is elect, regenerate, going to heaven when they die.

And everybody has a category for visible church. So you've got the roster of the elect, the decreedly elect, known to God, and then you have the library of all the church directories, all the names and phone numbers of all the visible church members.

As a Baptist, I'm tracking. Okay. So that's visible, invisible. The thing that gets me in trouble is that I believe in that distinction of visible and invisible, but I believe that the visible church really does have an objective connection to Christ in some sense.

But not in a salvific sense? Not in a salvific sense, but an objective connection to Christ.

Through the ordinances. Yeah. And just for the visible church is the church of Christ.

It's the body of Christ. Yeah. When they gather, His presence is there with them. Right. Now the church is going to be without spot or wrinkle at the end of history or any such blemish, but it's got spots and wrinkles and blemishes now.

There are dead branches in the vine, John 15, that get cut out.

There are non -fruit bearing branches in the olive tree, Romans 11, that get cut out.

So I believe that obviously if a branch is cut out of the olive tree, that's not one of the decreedly elect, but it was in the olive tree.

And the fact that I say there's a connection to Christ that's not salvific, but this person is in some sense attached to the body of Christ in a way that God recognizes is the sore spot.

That's the thing that makes people kick. So if I said, well, the non -elect church member is a bit of tumbleweed that got caught in the branches of the olive tree, then it was, ah, very good.

Because it's tumbleweed or the next door neighbor's Frisbee kid, the next door neighbor's kid got his

Frisbee caught in the branches. Well, it's in the tree, but it's not of the tree. That's easy for us to process.

But the illustrations of Scripture have a more organic connection. Caiaphas grew on the olive tree.

Judas grew on the olive tree. And many professing Christians who apostatize or who die and go to hell, they're

Christians in the sense that they're not Buddhists. You know, they're Christians in the sense that they're members of the visible church, but they're not elect.

So I'm a Westminsterian on my soteriology, five solas,

I'm just Westminster confession down the line. What the analogy, when

I was a Baptist, all of that made sense to me. You're no longer a Baptist. No, I'm a Baptist. But when

I was a Baptist years ago, that made sense to me even as a Baptist. And part of one of the things that helped, the analogy that he used in one of the books was like the wedding ring.

So the sacraments are like a wedding ring. And so there's an objective sense in which that person, those people are married.

The question is whether he's a faithful husband or an unfaithful husband. So he's a real husband, okay? And God recognizes this person is covenantally obligated to fulfill his duties as a husband.

So he's covenantally obligated to do so. But if he commits adultery, if he cheats, he's now an unfaithful husband, but you wouldn't say about him, well, he was never a real husband in the first place, right?

He was like, no, that's why it's really bad is because he was a real husband, he was covenantally bound, and now he's being unfaithful to the terms of the covenant that he was in, and therefore he has a stricter punishment.

In that sense, baptism and participation in the Lord's Supper is like the wedding ring.

And so you say that person's really covenanted with Christ. There's obligations that that person has by virtue of their baptism, and I could have said that as a

Baptist. In that sense, as a Baptist, a Baptist could say, yeah, they've taken upon themselves the obligations of a

Christian, right, to be faithful to Christ, and now they've fallen away and they've rejected Him. It's worse for them because they were a real, they were really covenantally bound.

And you don't sort of allow their apostasy to overturn everything that came before it.

Right. And if there's, not to complicate this, but I think this extra complication shows how in illustrations like marriage, we understand the distinction that I'm trying to make with regard to the church.

We understand it perfectly. So let's say this cheating husband comes back to his wife. He gets radically saved.

He repents of his adultery. He comes back to his wife, confesses everything to her, and she receives him, and then says in her joy, finally, tonight,

I have a husband. Well, the reason, and if he were to say, really?

I wasn't your husband before? Well, that would mean that I wasn't cheating. Right. No, you were really cheating because you were a husband in sense

A. But now that you've repented and our union is what it ought to be, he's also now a husband in sense

B. Okay. So, thought experiment, or maybe not much of a thought experiment.

A baby is baptized with air quotes. Am I right? A baby...

No, it's water. We don't baptize no one. No one gets baptized with air quotes.

A baby gets baptized in your church and you call him a Christian, right? You don't mean when you call him a

Christian that he's saved. Yeah, we are making no claim about the regenerate status of the child at that moment.

And that would be probably the biggest issue with most of the critics is that you, I guess

I say most of the critics, you've interacted with far more of them than I have. But from those that I have talked to, the conflation of being a

Christian without being regenerate, that's what I kind of... That would be a difference with the

Reformed Baptists. Right. Yeah. That's right. Okay. But with Presbyterians... Yeah. Tell me why they're so mad at you.

And you say that you're historic Westminster and they say, no, you're not.

On this point, I honestly don't know. Because if I were to listen to one of them talk about what we're claiming when we baptize an infant,

I'd say, yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, that's true. Okay. Yeah. He might be converted 10 years later.

The sign is not so annexed to the moment of administration that you have to claim regenerate status at that moment or ever, right?

So there is no daylight at all between my position and the Westminsterian position on what happens when you baptize an infant.

That infant might be regenerate before, might be regenerated at that moment, might be regenerated years later, might never be regenerated.

Yeah. That sounds more reasonable than some of the stuff Martin Luther had to say about infants and baptism and regeneration.

Yes, but we make allowances for Lutherans. We've got to make allowances for Lutherans. We love them. I mean, he grew up in the seedbed of Roman Catholicism.

Give them a pass. Were you going to say something else, brother? I was going to say that there also is an element in which, like when

I listened to your interview with Ligon Duncan, the way that he talked, I guess he was raised in a house where his dad was a

Presbyterian and his mom was a Baptist. So the way that he talked about his upbringing sounded to me much more like the way

Baptists talk about being raised. He talked more in terms of a conversion experience and so forth like that, and it sounded to me a little more

Baptist than Westminster does, which I know is odd, but it's like, to my ears,

I know that he was baptized as an infant in the

Presbyterian Church, but it didn't seem to have the...I don't think he would talk in terms of, that child was therefore covenantally bound, married to Christ, objectively speaking, recognized by God, and therefore obligated to grow up to trust

Christ. I don't know that he would use the strong language because he was operating more in what I would call a

Baptist frame. And some of what I think was going on in the federal vision, and I think some of the guys that I've talked to who are there, that aren't here but were a part of that whole thing, there was a number of things animating the federal vision that don't get sort of the same play nowadays, because it all becomes about this sort of thing, but some of it was, we want a higher liturgy, we want weekly communion, which wasn't common in the

PCA back then. They wanted more formal psalm singing and sort of reformation of worship, which on those grounds,

I talked to some guys the other day who said, on those grounds we won, because there's a lot more PCA churches that practice weekly communion now, a lot of young guys that are sort of absorbing what the federal vision was pushing for first.

But the linchpin was this paedo -communion thing, because by admitting a child to the table as soon as they're able to ingest bread and drink, you are saying something about, hey, we're regarding them as full insiders.

We're not sort of doing a, they're in but they're not, they're in but they're not, where we're going to wait until they make a public profession of faith, can articulate the gospel, and do the whole nine yards, which again sounds like what

Baptists do before baptism. And so it was that, so the paedo -communion thing really did become a rub, because it was, if we really believe that baptism unites one to Christ covenantally, not necessarily spiritually, savingly, they'll be in heaven, but covenantally they're bound to Christ, then we should treat them that way.

And so that's what the paedo -communion practice does. And that was a big, that was the most visible thing that blows up over it.

Well, if you're a Presbyterian and you're watching or listening to this, and you wish I would have pressed Doug and Joe harder on this,

I can't, because I can only argue like a Baptist, and I didn't agree with them when I got here. So let's talk a little bit about theological triage.

Let's start with this question, Joe, give you a chance to be the provocateur you are so naturally.

In one of the emails that you and I exchanged, I said, at some point, I would love to talk with you about empathy and whether or not it's a sin.

And you wrote back and said, I would like to talk to you about nuance and whether or not it's a sin. Rosaria Butterfield told me in my interview that, in my interview with her, that nuance is a postmodern neologism, and we shouldn't use it.

Her recommendation for a replacement for that in our podcast was room for teleology. Anyways, so what say you,

Joe Rigney? Is nuance a bad word? Should we not use it? I think I would put nuance in the same bucket

I'm putting empathy. So I've got a category for the good kind of empathy. I know when people are using it in just a normal... You mean untethered empathy.

Yeah, so untethered empathy is the bad thing. Untethered nuance. Untethered nuance. Untethered most any good thing. Right, yeah, all the good things untethered, they should all be tethered to Jesus.

But nuance suffers from some of the same defects, I think, that empathy does. It goes wrong in the same ways, and it's going wrong in those ways, like, right now, a lot.

So the first one would be selectivity. So oftentimes, the people who advocate most forcefully for nuance, we need to be nuanced, are selectively nuanced.

It means that certain people are going to get all kinds of charity and grace, and we're going to make allowances, but it's going to be selectively applied.

And there's another group of people who are going to get zero nuance whatsoever. They're just going to get hammers. They're going to get...

BLM riots, J6 protesters. Right. Right, so nuance with one, lock them up in the other.

That's selective nuance. Right, exactly. The other thing is, I think my substitute for nuance, the thing that I'm always after is clarity, which

I think gets you everything that... So like the way that I think biblical compassion gets you everything that empathy, the good stuff that's in empathy, but then more,

I think clarity gets you everything good that's in nuance and more. So the difference is this.

Nuance is often, hey, we need to show that this thing is as complex as it is.

So it's complex, and I need to show its complexity. That's the good kind of nuance. And I want to say, amen, if it's complex, we should make sure we're nuancing and showing that complexity.

Clarity gets you that, but clarity also says, and if it's simple, we better show that it's simple. Okay, and you get both.

Whereas nuance sometimes will bleed in and say, we're going to try to say, here's something that's really simple, and we're going to complexify it because of nuance.

So all of a sudden, things that ought to be just straight down the middle, clear, are muddied by those who are advocating for nuance.

And then on top of that, nuance, when they face a truly complex problem, they assume complex problems cannot be solved.

So the only problems that can be solved are the simple ones, and they complexify everything, complicate everything.

And then once you have your complex problem, you don't ever have to get to an answer, which is the off ramp to relativism.

So I can always tell a liberal or a budding liberal, if they start to wrestle with the contours of something, that they wrestle with problems.

Well, why can't we beat them up? Why do we always have to wrestle? And it's like Jacob and the angel wrestling to a stalemate, and then no resolution.

And so after all the nuance, smoke is cleared, we still don't know what we're supposed to do.

So that's why I'm always aiming for clarity. I want to show clear things, simple things to be as straightforward as they are.

If something is complicated, I want to show that complexity. And I think clarity gets both, whereas nuance can get one of them, but often complicates straightforward things.

I think I understand what you're saying conceptually. I just don't know in the way that people speak if that holds up.

I mean, certainly if you train the people around you to talk like that and think like that, maybe it can bleed out from there in a good way, praise

God. But nuance, talking about shades of meaning, it feels like as soon as you use the word clarity, at some point, you're going to have to explain that you're using the word clarity because this is a complicated subject that requires a nuanced discussion.

Well, it would be like even with the federal vision thing. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. So there's a good example of there's layers of issues involved here from your practices to what you think the practices mean to this theology that undergirds them.

There's lots of layers involved there. So you would say, hey, let's be nuanced about this. I'd say just as simply, let's be clear about it.

Let's clarify what the nub of the issue is at each place. But the goal of clarity is to then bring resolution.

Now we've got to choose, is it this or is it that? It's going to push us towards action, whereas nuance allows us to sit in the fog.

That's at least the danger of it. So I know that when you're doing it, you've got to put podcast name room for nuance.

And having listened to it, I think you do a great job of trying to bring the clarity. I think you're trying to bring clarity and using it for nuance.

And just like normal people who use the word empathy to mean sympathy or compassion, I'm not going around correcting everybody, but I'm still going to wave the banner and say, it's a good bet that in a theological conversation about, say, sexuality, first person to name nuance is probably going liberal.

And there's going to be no nuance for a racist. There's going to be no nuance for J6. Even the interview you did with Ligon, I think, demonstrated this precisely because there was nuance in all sorts of places except a few, and then all of a sudden nuance went out the window.

There was no nuance about Moscow mood, but there was nuance about a whole host of other things. We can talk about that. We anticipated people being squeamish about the word nuance.

We put out a video before the podcast even launched, basically saying people are trying to have difficult conversations on a time crunch.

Somebody writes a book about racial reconciliation in the church, and they're like, come on our show. You have 15 minutes.

15 minutes? Race in the church? Let's have a long conversation about a complex issue.

I think what you said is exactly right, brother. We want room for nuance precisely so that we can get to the truth, not so we can obfuscate the truth.

What you said is noted, and I will try to be as wise and discerning as I can in the use of that word.

Let's talk a little bit about evangelical discourse at large right now.

Doug, I remember, I don't know how long ago it was, but you had a pretty long back and forth with Thabiti Anyabwile about your views on racism and slavery and the history of that in our country.

I remember reading those at the time, blown away by the charity, the grace, the love, the patience, the unity that was on display.

That couldn't happen today. No, and it came to sort of a crashing halt after because Thabiti got the treatment.

The nuanced treatment. Thabiti got worked over. What do you mean?

By his people, by his constituency? For being willing to talk with me. In today's discourse, he platformed me.

He treated me with respect. I treated him with respect. I thought it was stellar.

I was just very gratified by that exchange, and I would have wanted to publish it in a book.

Oh, absolutely. But Thabiti didn't agree, and it was because he was at the bottom of a dog pile because how dare he do what he did.

Do you remember what year that was or roundabout? 2013. Oh, thank you. I didn't. Is this guy autistic?

I was in the middle of behind it, like all of that sort of stuff.

Doug came out to Minneapolis, and his presence was a problem because it was going to ruffle feathers in the

African -American community where our pastors had been trying to build bridges, and people were reading internet articles, and so we organized kind of a get -together back in 2009 for that one where there was kind of a back -behind -the -scenes discussion, and that at some point then eventually led to,

I think, Thabiti finally saying, hey, Doug's being mainstreamed enough.

He's speaking at Desiring God conferences. He was writing articles for Desiring God and for TGC. I think, did you write for TGC ever?

I think once. I think he wrote for...so there was a season. Check to see if it's still there. Right, yeah, I doubt it, but...

Room for nuance. Yeah, and so there was a, hey, this is a big enough deal, and Thabiti thought, I need to address it head on, and he decided to do so as a

Christian and a gentleman. Like he actually said, I'm going to try to...this is serious enough that we can't just, you know, carpet bomb it and make accusations, and then you had this great thing, but it was...

the pressures to not do that were hard and heavy. I remember Eric Mason was supposed to come and speak at in Moscow at one point.

Did he back out for similar reasons? He canceled because the pressure was applied, basically.

Yeah. So, and sometimes we don't have a way of knowing how much pressure it took.

It might just be, hey, did you know who these guys are? Yeah. And then he backs out. Or it could be,

I want to go, you really better not. I want to go, you really...we've had numerous cancellations, people...this

is what we call the embargo. Okay. And the embargo...basically,

this touches on something Joe and I were talking about, is that when...in your interview with Ligon Duncan, he's got a personal relationship with Keller.

He knows him. And he can say, we differ on a bunch of stuff, but I know him, right?

And I can work with him. And the same thing with Frame. I know him. I've got all kinds of differences with him, but I know him.

And there are people who cannot afford to be in a relationship with me, because they'd get to know me, and I'd get to know them.

And all of a sudden, they would be sort of on the chopping block, because they would have to...

If they had integrity, they couldn't pile on. They couldn't pile on. And the one...basically,

in the whole evangelical world, and I'll say this to my dying day, give him all kinds of credit, is

John Piper. John Piper was the only one in that whole constellation of first -tier conference speaker types who took the trouble to pursue clarity, right?

And it's not like... It's not like he agreed. Yeah. Once he gets clarity, it's not like he won't tell you, man, you're all messed up on this.

But John disagrees with you like a Christian scholar and a gentleman. And he does it within the context of a personal relationship.

And that personal relationship cannot be allowed to form in this day and age, because once it forms, there would be people who start saying, you know, they're not so bad.

They're not orcs out in Moscow. That was the most illuminating thing. Your interview with Ligon, for me, was really illuminating, because of that contrast between the way...

And the thing that was in play was the face -to -face interaction. So it was partnering with Keller, teaching with Keller, that said, hey, this is a big issue.

We disagree on women's ordination and deaconesses or whatever. But I know him, and he's a

Christian brother. The same thing showed up in the second version with Frame and McLeod and Robert Raymond, who he had big disagreements on the doctrine of the

Trinity, on doctrine of God stuff, right? Yeah, that stuff. Yeah. So he was like, I'm not with them.

I'm with the confessions, not with them, but I have all the affection in the world for them. And so it was clear he's capable of that.

And for me, it helped to shed light on the embargo. It's why those guys won't accept the invitations to come out here, why when we're coming out there, those invitations aren't given.

But what's interesting in the present day, I mean, you're here, so there is an element of like, there's a next generation of guys who didn't carpet bomb.

I think some of this does go back to federal vision stuff, where because everybody was saying heresy, heresy, heresy, at this point, to personalize him or anybody that's associated with FV would require probably a walk back, because as you got in, if you had the conversation, if you had the debate, and we keep amening stuff, then it makes it really hard to go, you guys are heretics.

It might be, oh, emphasis differences, or you want to accent that or accent that. And it would be clear that, oh, we're actually

Christian brothers who can disagree charitably, like lots of Christians do everywhere else. But the wall already went up, and so now efforts have to be made to make sure it does.

But there's another generation coming up for whom that history is not there, that big issue is not the same, they actually are listening more carefully, trying to understand...

They won't have to walk anything back. Right. They just got here. They just got here, so they don't have to walk anything back. And so it's possible to actually come have the conversations in ways that it wouldn't be for that older generation.

The other thing to tag onto this is really striking, and I pointed this out in my review of Woke Church and leagues forward to Woke Church, is that all the things he's concerned about in the federal vision are a glaring grease fire in Eric Mason's book.

The decay worth, what justification means, it's sort of like, okay, you can be as wobbly...

I'm on justification, forensic justification, punctilio justification, I'm a

Westminsterian, right down the line. And Eric Mason's fooling around with it in all the ways that federal vision people were accused of fooling around with it.

Eric Mason really does. Just from a different angle? Well, it was the justification is both a status and an action, and righteousness is both intrinsic and extrinsic.

And there's confusions all built up in it. He's quoting Fleming Rutledge, Anglican priestess, and Ernest Caseman, who's a new perspective, or proto -new perspective sort of guy.

So all of that's in that book, which if it had been him... If I'd written that. ...would have gotten the treatment. But it got passed over, and it was nuanced, right?

And I think the same thing is true even of someone like Piper, because Piper gets criticized roundly by certain reform types for his view of judgment according to works, that there's a concern that he's going to compromise justification by faith alone, and his definition of saving faith.

Which has to include affections. Which includes the affections, which is a treasuring Christ, and it's professors at RTS, you know, so it's

Fesco and Waters, who have really... We had a debate at ETS two years ago that I moderated between John and those two guys on the

Saving Faith book. And those guys were...I mean, they were cordial, and they were gracious in the sense of they were treating

John like a brother, but they were really adamant, this is a big deal, you're smuggling love, and you're smuggling things into the definition of faith, this is proto -Roman

Catholic. Those are the kinds of criticism they're making. But Ligon has no problem associating with John, you know, being friends with John, but it's a different sort of thing because the wall went up when it did, and now it has to be maintained.

Well, let's jump even more into the Ligon Duncan interview. All right, let's do. I just want you brothers to know my aim in bringing up that question with Ligon about the

Moscow mood was not...I'm not a pot stirrer. I don't think so. I mean, I guess the Lord will tell me on the last day if my heart was confused in any of that, but...

There's nothing wrong with stirring pots. It was a totally fair question. Ah, well, you should tell all the angry people on the internet that what

I did was a totally fair question. They don't listen to me. They react to me. I think

I'm...how do I want to ask this question? A lot of discernment bloggers and a lot of their friends and family, co -workers and neighbors, after that interview, they've basically said that Ligon Duncan is a coward.

He's woke. He needs to resign in shame. Do you agree with that?

No. I think he needs to correct some things. Sure. I think he needs to fix some things, and the angry hostiles who are after him...

Like all 50 ,000 of them. Yeah, are after him because I thought it was a very poor performance, and it was provocative.

Okay, so I don't think Christians ought to be provoked. My dad taught me, always act, never react, and people are reacting to Ligon Duncan, but he did some things that were...he

can't be surprised that he's in a duel because he slapped some people with the gloves. Yeah. And it was things like slander, and slander has no place in a

Christian's armory or no place in a

Christian's tactics. I don't have any reason to believe these people are Christians. Right. Well, what is that?

And who was he talking to? You were talking about us. Right. So he's saying, I don't have any reason to believe that they're even

Christians, and I disapprove of slander. And then when

I heard that he concluded everything, there's a lack of self -awareness, and everybody was saying, don't you see what you're doing?

Right. And then when he said things like, these guys talk real big online, but if you get them in a room, they'd curl up into a fetal position in three seconds.

And so in my blog response to this, I pointed back in the middle of the

FV thing, I was traveling down south for other reasons, and I was going through...I was in Jackson, and a friend of Ligg's offered to set up a meeting.

So we contacted, just to...no cameras, no mics, just to personal contact. And he didn't...no,

no thank you. So we are the ones eager to meet, talk, work things through.

Public, private. Public, private. Microphones, cameras, no microphones, no cameras. We've offered to fly other places.

And the embargo is pretty solid when it comes to this.

But then for someone who's sort of ensconced behind the embargo wall to say, if you got these people alone, they would just wilt.

Well, can I push back on that a little bit? After the maelstrom that was the response to that interview,

I went back and I watched that clip more than once to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding things. It appeared to me that the fetal position comment, and what was the other one that you said?

The slander. The slander thing. It seemed like he was speaking more broadly. Now you might say, well, that includes us.

But I'm sure you know the Moscow mood describes an event that is beyond what is happening right here in Moscow.

And I don't think you guys would disagree with me that there are a lot of people on the internet who have adopted the

Moscow mood or some derivation thereof. Adopted the name. Yeah, or you could call it a bastardization of the

Moscow mood, right? But who are big and tough on the internet.

But if you got them in the same room, they would wilt. And when I went back and I watched that, it didn't seem like Lig had

Moscow proper in mind. And I'm not Lig's a grown man. He can defend himself. I'm not trying to defend him. But I'm just telling you, honestly, my impression was he was speaking about kind of troublemakers on the internet in general.

I think, I mean, that's me. Well, and the thing was, your question was specifically talked about the

Moscow mood. And then he brought up Kevin's article, which wasn't about internet, you know, bro culture.

It was targeted specifically at two videos and why Moscow's influence was bad. The response from me and Jared and everybody else was, we're defending the

Moscow mood. So the question's about Moscow mood. And then the answer has to do with, and then he, so he took it where he did.

And it wasn't, I would want to give him the charity and say, cause I've met and we've, he and I've talked, like we've, you know, when

I was at Bethlehem, he would come through and I don't think if I said, Lig, were you questioning my salvation? I think he would say, absolutely not.

Right. Okay. So I would give him that charity. But when he made the comment, some of these people aren't even saved.

Yeah. Or, and, or the other one was though, when you asked some other question and he, I think it was when the slander and mockery thing came up and he, his first thing was, which brings us back to the

Moscow mood. So he, he circled back. But see, that shows me that when he was talking about that, he wasn't really talking about you guys.

I think he was talking about internet discourse. I think you're right. Mockery and slander. I think you're right. He was starting there, but what it triggered in his head is that's

Moscow mood. Where did they learn to do that? Sure. And they learned it from him. Yeah. And so here, if, if Lig were to contact me, if I were to talk to him and he would say, oh man,

I, I wasn't talking about you at all. I'd accept that completely. Okay. But it sure looked like he was talking about it.

Right. And, and so if, if what he said got the chimps jumping. Yeah. And there was this big reaction.

I think that whatever things the, the people who are out of control need to correct with God and cool their jets and, and whatever they're doing,

I think Lig needs to take responsibility for having been provocative in a way that it, it may not have been slander and mockery on his part of us, particularly, but it sure looked that way.

He should have been more careful. Well, and yeah, so, and the irony of sort of criticizing indiscriminate bomb throwing or grenade throwing while throwing grenades that you're not sure who he's aiming at.

Like, that's what indiscriminate means is like, we don't, we don't know who we're talking about. And it was, it was striking because he did say at one point,

I don't think that voice. So he used that, he wouldn't even name, he didn't name Doug, but he sort of referred to that voice and should be having an influence or something to that effect.

And so it was clear what, who he's trying to differentiate from. And again, your question was a setup for him to do something like this, you know, because you set it up with a, hey, you're, you're gracious and disagreement, you'll stick to your guns, but you're, but you're charitable.

Like we just, like you just were with Keller. What do you think about Moscow mood? It would have been a fantastic opportunity for him to say something like, you know, those guys do a lot of different things out there and, and you know, they, you know great stuff on marriage and family or something and pay a compliment and say, but I don't really like the way that they conduct themselves.

It's not my thing. And he could have done that and then moved on, but he kept circling back to it because differentiating from us was an important thing for him to do.

It was important for him to say, and, and you can think about it this way. The, the people that he's willing to share a stage with, so Kellerites, he's, he's willing to share a stage with the

Kellerites. So he's going to praise Keller. The frame guys and those sort of theistic mutualists, he would share a stage with those guys and have a debate and discussion about the issues.

He's not going to share a stage and he needs to have a reason why. So we've got to be pushed far enough out. I would share stage with any of them, with any of them.

And the same thing's true of like the abolitionists, right? So the, the random shot at the abolitionists at the end, which I'm sure you got grief for as well, where, where he said, you know, these abolitionists, where were they for all these years?

They just all of a sudden showing up at wanting to abolish abortion. He kind of takes a shot at that.

And it was a, it was a puzzling one, but it was like, there's certain groups that I will not be associated with and want to put distance and there's others that I want to treat as we're in that, we're all in the family and, and so forth.

So Eric Mason, even the theonomist, which was funny is the theonomist got, you know, they're misguided. They're well -intentioned, but misguided.

There was charity there towards the recons because they're dead. Critical race theory, one of the critical theory in general, but let's be specific here.

One of the tenants of critical race theory is race. Racism is ubiquitous. If you think it's not there, that's because you're blinded and you are part of the problem.

And what that does is it trains people to see racism where it's not. Do you think it's possible leading question alert?

Do you think it's possible that from so many years of sort of feeling like you've been pushed to the boundaries of evangelicalism, that you have a bit of a complex and can personalize things that are not personal?

Yeah, I would say in the abstract, certainly sure. If if they shoot at you long enough, the next shot that you hear might not be aimed at you at all.

But you may have good reason to believe that. So Mark Twain once said, a cat that sits on a hot stove lid will never sit on a hot stove lid again, but neither will it sit on a cold one.

So, yeah, if someone fires up their attack machine and I start my left eye starts to twitch,

I might be I might be making a mistake thinking that they're talking about me when they're not.

Yeah, but they usually are. So and have consistently been.

But I think I'm pretty placid and easygoing when it comes to that.

I don't sleep fine. I don't sit up nights worrying, worrying about it. So I would say a complex is not what the word

I would use. But if something blows up and someone asked me, who do you think he's talking about? Yeah, I would probably say, well, yeah, probably me.

And and one way that it would you could disprove it if there was if there were people who were willing to accept the invitation, it would sort of put the so so part of your question is you guys say there's maybe

I'll rephrase it. You guys think there's an embargo. Is that could it just be that it's in your head that you guys that you know what

I mean? Is is there really concerted efforts to make sure that Moscow stays quarantined? And it's like, well, it maybe it's just in our heads.

I don't think I wouldn't say that. But an easy way to disprove it would be to lift the embargo.

If somebody were to show up or accept an invocation to discuss anything, then it would sort of be.

And I didn't mention earlier. Not only do we have people scheduled to come here that have canceled, but I've been invited to various conferences and then been uninvited.

So that's happened numerous times. And when I'm invited, oftentimes I'll say, hey, thank you for the invitation.

Why don't you look a few things up on the Internet first? Yeah. Are you really sure? Right. Yeah, I'm really sure. But you have to you also have to understand it's not like I'll just say this on his behalf.

He's not offended by it. Like it like again, it's not like so sometimes I think people hear that and they go, you're trying to you're painting yourself as a victim.

You're trying to get empathy. It's like that's the last thing, you know, that there's not there's none of that. Icky empathy, empathy.

I guess the only reason I ask that is because in the moment, I didn't even for a second think that those comments were directed at you guys.

It wasn't until the backlash on the Internet that I went, oh, OK, I see how people got there.

But in the moment, I thought, well, certainly he's talking about the way people have the Moscow mood has sort of just become a label for people who are sarcastic, combative, so on and so forth.

Theological. All right. Sort of. OK, so we're going to talk about that later, but I guess we'll talk about it now.

Let me ask you this. Do you believe in the woke, right? The woke, right? The woke, right?

Like basically the equivalent of the woke left, but the dissident, right, guys? Yeah. Think about GK Beal sort of you become what you behold.

You know, you spend so much time interacting with the woke that you begin to mimic their tactics.

Well, I would say there's I wouldn't say mimicking their tactics, although there is some of that.

I would say that and this is something I'm actually quite concerned about on the right is identity politics.

Yes, is very much a danger on the right. Yes. OK, we don't want to just do it better than them, right?

Well, which is what a lot of people are doing. These are people who have been taunted their entire adult lives for being white.

OK, and finally, they say, OK, I can't do anything about it. I might as well be proud of it. So I might as well embrace it.

And I'll take a page from your book and there is not your book, a page from the woke left, right?

So I'll take a page from Saul Alinsky. I'll take a page from those guys and I'm going to be white and proud.

I'm going to start hating Jews. I'm going to start, you know, I'm going to start doing the thing. And that is a big concern of mine.

And I regard it as almost entirely the creation of the left. Oh, yeah, right.

They invented it. They can you fill out the almost almost entirely?

Yeah, I think a bunch of it comes from Adam. In other words, everybody's a sinner.

And so basically, vain philosophies oftentimes grease the skids.

But we don't really need help coming up with sin. A lot of this, a lot of the agitation on the right is envy driven.

And envy is something we get from Adam, right? The material and the lies and the stories that are told we can get from the propagandist.

Two more factors that I might add to that, although, you know, good base level foundational sin stuff there.

We'll keep that. I think whenever you spend so much time engaging with people in a particular battle, it's just so easy for the way that they do battle to become the way that you do battle.

Yeah, fight fire with fire. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Right. And Jesus kind of said to do the opposite of that.

There's a guy, there's a guy on the right, Kurt Schlichter, who's got a tagline that he addresses to the liberals.

He said, you're not going to like the new rules. You invented these new rules and we're coming back at you.

And we're going to use your rules to come after you. And you're not going to like the old blues song.

It ain't no fun when the rabbit's got the gun. That's what we're looking at here. Many moons ago,

Russell Berger and I on Defending Confirmed did a podcast series against critical theory proper.

And then all the manifestations thereof, queer theory, fat theory, every theory, critical pedagogy.

But then our last episode in the series was a word to those with whom we agree, be careful, be careful.

You can oppose wokeness in a way that is unbecoming of Christ. We took a lot of heat for that because they were very happy when we were going, yeah, woke is bad and woke is bad.

And they should be happy when we say that. But when we gave that last little bit of warning, we caught a lot of flack for that.

Have you had any of that in your ministry where you have, not the flack, excuse me. Have you done any of that, like don't fight fire with fire?

Absolutely, man. I've said over and over to people, don't take the bait.

Don't take the bait. Don't take the bait on the antisemitism, which is starting to manifest itself on the right.

I've been fighting that tooth and nail. And a lot of people have sort of, a lot of people on the right have responded with an okay boomer kind of thing.

You're a boomer con, you're a Reaganite, you're that kind of conservative. We are very grateful to you for the decades of service you put in and we'll take it from here.

It's time to take grandpa's car keys. William Wolfe kind of reminds me of that. I think he stood up at one of your events and asked you a question.

Anyways, go ahead. Yeah, he was at one of the events, but he's real warm.

And he wouldn't. And William's a personal friend of mine. I'm not trying to talk bad about him, but you said, hey, the ship's going down.

And he was like, that's defeatist, right? I mean, anyways. We've issued the warnings.

And while recognizing the different threat levels posed by these, which is the no enemies to the right discussion of we're not gonna reactively cancel people to the right just because the left starts calling names.

We know how that works. Some of the, even the back to the question of death by a thousand cuts, at some point people have to realize if you get used to putting daylight between you and another

Christian over lies, it'll just get used on you. You're incentivizing the thing.

And there's a real need for, if it's not true, that's when you wanna put your arm around and this is a

Christian, this is a brother and not put the distance because it's, cause you're trying to save your credibility with people who are willing to lie about everybody.

And who are never gonna give you that credibility anyway. Right, yeah, chase that as long as you want. Can I read you guys two quotes from a pastor friend who is generally sympathetic to you guys?

He watched a recent video and he wrote these and I asked him,

I said, hey, that's a really good question. I think, can I just read that in the interview? And he said, yeah. So he defends mockery, but missed the real issue.

I think he would be you. Doug defends mockery, but missed the real issue, which is his loose tribe of online followers that treat other

Christians as the enemies of the truth with their mockery. Let's stop there. Let's do the first one. I think one of the fair critiques that I've heard against Moscow is not that mockery or sarcasm is in itself sinful, but it is more often than not aimed at true brothers in Christ in a way that's unhelpful rather than being aimed at people outside of the flock.

Thoughts on that? Well, I would say scripturally, the people who are targets of scriptural mockery are almost always religious leaders within the covenant.

So now we're getting back into a little bit of the Pharisees, Sadducees. So the religious, when

Jesus, in Jesus' day, there were about 6 ,000 Pharisees. They were the most respected religious group in Israel until Jesus got done with them.

And Jesus just savaged them. And nobody calls their group a resurgent

Phariseeism. He just wrecked that. And I think that Ezra was probably the first Pharisee of the scribal tradition that began studying the law.

And so I think, and if you look at the etymology of the word, Phariseeism is very close to Puritanism.

It's the same kind of, it was the same kind of movement. And I think when Phariseeism began, it was a noble thing, and it went to seed.

And then Puritanism, I think, was a noble thing, one of the best things ever. And then there are Puritanical types downstream, it went to seed.

And so when Jesus went after the people, what was he going after?

He was going after the broadness of their phylacteries, the length of their robes, how long they prayed, how they gave alms, all religious things, right?

That's biblical. But didn't Jesus basically say that they were sons of hell? Right, and members of the covenant.

Yeah, so again, I guess that's, we're going back to a little bit of a Presbyterian distinction, but like when you mock and slander someone who hasn't lost the gospel.

Well, slander is... Oh, sorry, sorry, no, no, the other S word, S -H -I, no. Satire. Yeah, mocking, satire, sarcasm.

You guys do that against people who haven't abandoned the gospel, who aren't Pharisees, who aren't sons of hell.

They just, you know, they might have different cultural impulses. Yeah, so this is where I would put... So the mockery and satire, the faithful biblical kind is a form of rebuke, okay?

And it operates on a dimmer switch. So when you're dealing with someone that you think is actually not a

Christian, it gets turned up to 11 and Jesus does, you, sons of hell, that sort of thing. But at a smaller level, it can be used for a more mild rebuke.

Hey, knock it off, idiot, right? So it's that sort of thing. But the dimmer switch means if you see satire, mockery, caricature as legitimate tools for rebuking sin and folly and you just need to grade it up, then when it comes to the way that we try to use it, we try to appropriately dish it out.

The interesting thing about your question though was to say mockery and satire and dismissiveness is inappropriate against other

Christians, that's what Ligon was doing in the interview, right? And the interesting thing about it is

I don't actually object to his use of it, right? To caricature, to say this is what they're doing and to draw us with big ears because we have big ears as a caricature is a legitimate tactic.

Jesus does it. Camel going through the eye of needle, hyperbole, the prophets do it. It's a legitimate tactic.

The thing I objected to was criticizing that tactic while using it.

Sure, but apart from Lig, just in general. Apart from Lig, go to this. When Jesus attacks the

Pharisees and savages them, he doesn't name any individual Pharisee.

He just doesn't name them. He's talking about a particular movement and describes them a particular way.

The way if I did talking about charismatic, a charismatic church and let's say

I called it Knee Deep in Glory Worship Center, right? Or let's say - You're good, man.

That's why you keep reading even if you don't agree. So Jesus is categorizing a group a particular way.

It's a caricature of a group. So if I were a cartoonist and I wanted to draw picture of an anti -nuke protest and I drew a picture of a hippie chick lady and beads and wireless glasses and a tie -dye shirt, everybody would know that I was drawing a liberal peacenik, right?

But I'm not picking on any individual, right? But people who fit that description, who fit in that caricature would feel affronted.

But when I talk about evangelical goo churches or orthodusty, reformed orthodusty churches or charismatic

Knee Deep in Glory, that kind of thing, there are numerous occasions where if the shoe fits, wear it.

Sure. But I'm not attacking any particular brother in Christ. What about your comment against Russell Moore in your most recent, what is it called?

No Quarter November? Okay, which one? We've been doing this since before.

Russell Moore trying to raise money. It was in the trailer. Oh, in the trailer. In the trailer, yeah, yeah.

Raising money for the year, I'll say. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so you named Russell Moore.

I named Russell Moore. Yeah, I'm just, because you were saying like, yeah, I'm speaking generalities. And by the way, I think you're at your best when you are doing that.

But sometimes you don't though. Right. So with Russell Moore raising, I think it was

Russell Moore raising money for the year I'll see. And I was talking about being cautious,

I think at that moment. Yeah. All I did was name him. You don't think you mocked him?

For what? Well, dang, I feel like I should have watched it before I came to this interview.

In the moment, it felt like, ooh, he took a shot at Russ Moore. No, I named him. And basically what

I did was I implied that we are on different teams as we're approaching this cultural moment.

His approach is very, very different from our approach. I was making a distinction between his approach and our approach, where we're kind of out there with the flamethrower and he's doing something very cautious and mild.

Yeah, gotcha. But it was not a big shot. Okay, fairly mild.

Yeah, it was real mild. Okay. Second quote. This is the dilemma for people like me.

The way Doug talks here about evangelicals responding to COVID and CRT makes me want to align with Moscow.

But in practice, the way his tribe mocks and scorns those Christians on the other side makes me want nothing to do with them.

It's almost like when you share edgy humor with kids and they go out in public and immediately use the same jokes in inappropriate ways and offend everyone by imitating their dad.

That was pretty good. That is good. And it's a real problem. So when

I've written on satire, one of the things I've done is I've written 21 principles for a satiric writer.

What should - Give them the guardrails. Yeah, what are the guardrails? What are the principles? And I have no doubt that there are people who take their inspiration from me.

They're 19 years old. They read a couple of my blog posts and then go home and make fun of their mom, right?

Well, they shouldn't do that. Right. I'm not in favor of that. They shouldn't do it.

And in that case, they're doing it despite your stated... Like they're not actually imitating you because you said do it this way with these boundaries and they blew past the boundaries.

And so at that point, like there's an element of like, people are going to sin and you can issue the exhortations and you can do all that you can do, but we don't...

There's other than if they were in our church where we might have some discipline.

If it was somebody in our church, and I'll say this, that's happened. There've been times when church members have gotten feisty online in ways that were unhelpful and they'll get a text from their elder saying, hey, cool it, we don't need your help.

I wish that elder would text some of the people who have been from your church attacking me online. So from, well, it's from our church.

And by the way, I hope I don't... I'm not trying to sound like a victim. I'm trying to be funny. I mean, it's true. But if they're from our church, it'd be worth us knowing about that.

So basically if someone's under our care, pastoral care, and they are off the leash online, that's something we pastor.

So if we're responsible for them and someone said, hey, so -and -so is out there going after...

They will get a note or someone will check in with them. That's something we care about. If someone in South Carolina is doing that and I don't know anything about it,

I don't know who he is, but he claims he's inspired by me. Yeah, world's a fallen place.

Okay, so help me think through this. This is a legitimate question. On the one hand, you know that you're influencing people to at minimum embrace mockery, sarcasm, so on and so forth.

But you're trying to put up all the right guardrails. You're trying to do that on top of a solid foundation, but you know it's gonna go awry.

Where do you accept responsibility or how do you accept responsibility when it does?

So I'd flip this around to take it out of the mockery thing and put it in someplace else and see what would you do.

So say you were gonna write a book encouraging people to be gentle and lowly. Just for example.

Just for example. Say someone wrote a book like that, okay? And let's say that you put up guardrails saying, of course, we know that Jesus wasn't always gentle and lowly, but also had a heart.

And you acknowledged this is one form and it's directed towards confused sheep and sheep without a shepherd and so forth.

But to wolves, he came down hard. And then somebody then took your book, gentle and lowly, and decided to go all woke and let in all the wolves in sheep's clothing.

And then somebody said, look what you did. And you said, no, no, I said that you ought to fight the wolves and you ought to draw the lines and we gotta be clear.

But then within that, we love and we show compassion and care. I'd say to that, in that situation, then you fulfilled your duty.

You put up the guardrails and somebody else jumped over them in order to do what they were gonna do. And nobody, it's funny how it's on this issue, it's on the use of mockery where people raise this question, but not in the other place.

This is the fire, this is Lewis's statement about we're always prone to bring a fire extinguisher to a flood. Right? And if you look around, one of my questions when people have acknowledged, as you did at the beginning, you know, everybody acknowledges that mockery and satire have a place in the biblical storyline.

Prophets did it, Jesus did it, Paul did it. So it has its place. But nevertheless, here's the hard question for you.

It's like, well, where are the other people? Is anybody else, other than say the Babylon Bee, faithfully doing it, even attempting to do it?

Or is it sort of like, this is the one sword in the arsenal that never gets brought out.

Why do you think some few people decide to use this tool? Because it's so effective.

It is truly effective. It really gets in people's midst, and then they counterattack. If you start shooting live ammo, you're going to get return fire.

And we have been the recipients of return fire for a long, long time. And on this question, here's another illustration.

I've taught many classes, classroom things, and I've given superlative grades to many students over the years, and I've flunked many students over the years.

I don't feel responsible for the students I flunked. Right. Because they didn't do the work.

They didn't do what I said. Yeah, yeah. I assigned this, and they didn't write the paper. I assigned that. So when people are out there imitating me, and they're flunking the course, they're not doing anything

I said. Their worst Doug Wilson impersonation. Yeah, that's John Dewey. Not that I want to quote him with appreciation too much, but John Dewey once said,

Lord, deliver me from my disciples. So there's a cohort of disciples that are in my name doing things that if they were taking a class from me on how to do it,

I would be flunking them, but they're not in my class. And so I don't feel responsible.

And this is the next thing. There's a chapter on this in Mere Christendom. It's the chapter on Jesus mobs.

When you look at the Jerusalem in the first century, that place was a powder keg.

It was ready to go up at any moment. And the reason they had to arrest

Jesus at night is because they were afraid of the crowds. And it says this numerous places.

The religious leaders were afraid of the crowds. And then in Acts, when they go to arrest the disciples, the apostles, they brought them very gingerly because they were afraid the crowd was going to stone them.

Now it's very clear that these crowds had not gotten the Sermon on the Mountain memo.

They were like radical Trump supporters. They're ready to start a revolution.

There were the people who listened to Jesus' teaching and got it. And there were people who were in favor of Jesus, had been baptized by John, but who had maybe one third of what, you know, maybe heard a parable or something.

And they were hopping mad at the Romans and hopping mad at the Jewish compromisers that were working with the

Romans. And they were an angry, seething mob, right? And in that moment,

Jesus went up to the temple and started flipping tables. Now, is

Jesus responsible for what the mayhem that might happen if a riot broke out?

So Jesus was not pouring oil on troubled waters. Jesus went to Jerusalem.

He knew what was going to happen in Jerusalem. He arranged to, he went up to the temple complex to touch their eyeball and did this in a very provocative way, got arrested and was railroaded in the middle of the night.

And he did it in a time when there were multitudes of people who would have taken his name and done it all wrong, right?

And well then, welcome to earth, kid, you know? That's just simply the way it is. If you're

George Whitefield, you're preaching, you're a great revivalist. Is there going to be some 19 -year -old kid who wants to be a great revival preacher?

For all the wrong reasons. For all the wrong reasons. And use all kinds of tactics you'd never use, but is going to come behind you and sort of claim your name.

Yeah, that's going to happen. And there's no way to avoid it. What would you say to someone like me who says in a vacuum,

I agree with everything that you've said about the serrated edge. Great little booklet, by the way. It's also on audio book.

If any of our listeners or viewers want to check it out, it's very good. If you want to kind of hear the whole theory behind all this.

But somebody who says, okay, in a vacuum, I understand that. For me personally, I'm so afraid that I won't use that serrated edge wisely and I'll end up hurting people more than helping people.

Would you say I need to kind of just like, no, learn how to do it, bro. Or like, no, stick with that impulse. No, so learn how to do it because this goes back to your gentle and lowly.

He said no, you said yes. Well, yes and no. Yeah, there's yes and no. A little bit of nuance here. Yeah, total nuance.

Complex things need very complex, yeah. Let's get clear. The gentle and lowly point. Are people who are afraid of being too acerbic or too polemical or too belligerent things that an elder must not be.

An elder must not be a brawler, must not be a striker. We want to fit the qualifications of 1

Timothy 3 and Titus 1. And so they concentrate on being loving and kind and gentle.

And I say, okay, is there no pathology associated with those virtues?

Do you mean pathology meaning it can go sideways? Badly, badly wrong. Yes. Not only can it go badly wrong, but it is doing so all over North America now.

It's destroying the church. The West, yeah. Right. It is the flood.

And people say you can't have too much satire. That's the fire extinguisher. So yeah, I don't know if we went out and tried to round up all the churches that are being torn apart because their pastor is too acerbic when he addresses the sins of the age.

Would come up with maybe 10, right? If we had to round up all the churches that are rotting out from the inside because of empathy, because of nuance, because of all the things that they've compromised on.

And these are all virtues that have become leprous. Kindness really is a virtue.

Gentleness really is a virtue. And one of the reasons why people don't want to come here is they don't want to see how happy our wives are.

They don't want to see that it's a community where people love each other and they sacrifice for each other.

It's not like we make fun of each other 24 -7 all the time. It's a small fraction of what we do.

But we reserve the right to pull that tool out of the tool chest in the appropriate biblical setting.

And the kindness and the gentleness and the goodness, all of that is the screaming threat to the church today.

We are way too nice. We are dying of nice. We are being conquered because we're nice.

We're being conquered because we want to be winsome no matter what. Winsome to the devil, right?

Yeah. My no was basically because of in the book of Acts or throughout the scriptures, there's lots of leaders who use the tool, but the people aren't necessarily expected to use the tool.

They're expected to laugh at it or to amen it. So Paul tells

Elamist the magician, you son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness. He doesn't need everybody in the crowd to start chanting it.

He just needs the people to say amen to it. So some of what I want to do is relieve the burden that like a normal church member.

So you're a pastor, so there's a little bit of a difference there. You need to have all the tools sharpened in your tool belt that you can from the compassion in the counseling room and from the pulpit to the serrated edge whenever it's called for.

But for a lay person, the call on their life is not necessarily to be, you know, using the serrated edge all the time.

Using the prophetic tool. But they need to know when they should say amen to it, that they should not along. Doug, a lot of the feedback that I've got,

I actually got an email yesterday from a pretty, I don't know, I guess moderately well -known discernment type guy who basically said, watch the interview, not happy with it.

Lig slandered these brothers, and I think you are complicit in that as well. And, you know,

I was part of the slander. So I just wanted to give you guys a chance to maybe address me directly if you have any concerns with,

I'm happy to repent of anything you think I should. No, I would say everything you needed to do in that interview, you're doing by being here.

Right. This is a Proverbs 18, 17 situation. If you had done that interview, and then we invited you to do something like this and you had refused, then he would have a point.

Right. Because you would have heard one side, it would have been lopsided. But the fact that you're willing to fly up here, which takes some doing.

Maybe nobody comes to your conferences just because it's so hard to get here. Anyways, go ahead, brother, sorry.

So the fact that you're here indicates to me that your interest is true balance and clarity.

Yeah, I think so. So basically, yeah. Any concerns I might've had are resolved by this.

Well, it's also something watching yourself back in an interview is revealing.

A lot of times I'll find myself listening to someone with whom I agree or disagree and just making a lot of noises, trying to be an engaged, active listener.

And that can even bother people. Like you were yessing and amening. I think I just do that when - You did a bunch of that now.

Yeah, I'm trying to - No, so I'm a teacher. It's a habit and I've had to actually work on it for myself because I've had people say it to me, which is with students, when

I ask them a question in class and they answer it, I'll often nod along and say yes, because I'm trying to encourage them.

I'm tracking with you, I'm following you, I understand. They may be saying something really stupid, but I'm nodding along because I'm wanting to draw them out.

Well, if you get in the habit of that in a classroom over 20 years, then you're in another setting where you probably should not be doing the encouragement thing like in an interview, where you should ask your questions and step out of it and let that guy talk.

And then you can follow up and point out the disagreements. But I just have the habit of doing it. So I think it's a totally normal thing.

Your wife probably really appreciates it. Well, she does it until I do it to people. She's like, why were you agreeing with him? I wasn't,

I was just understanding. Active listening. Last little thing on this, and then we'll move on. In the wake of,

I'm listing these out because I think it's pretty funny. In the wake of the interview, people who were upset about it have called me gay, low test, cowardly.

They've said that I'm castrated, a liberal, that I'm deceptive intentionally, so on. What would you say to people who have tried to defend your honor like that?

And I guess it's not just towards me. I would say that's not the way. That's not the way. Pretty simple, right? That's not the way.

Don't do that. No, I would say further. It's not like, okay, you did something that the

Bible says you shouldn't do. I would say that. Okay. But I would also say, and you're not helping.

The cause that, the offense that you took on our behalf and you came, you rushed in to defend us.

It set us back. It's not helping if you come unstuck.

Yeah. And it's reactive. So back to that point. So strategically, it's a bad habit. Yeah, and it's a bad habit, right?

A sin and a blunder. You're cultivating in yourself the habit of somebody does something and you just react to it.

And it's like, that's the problem. You need sober -minded people who can actually think clearly and act wisely.

Okay. Okay. Um, sorry. We've covered a lot of these questions that I have written down because we got ahead of ourselves.

Before we move on, I just want to say, I'm not like best friends with Lig. I've interviewed him twice and one of his best friends is one of my best friends.

That's about it. But I do love the brother. And I think the way that people have spoken about him after the interview is not okay.

To write a man's ministry off for perhaps speaking uncharitably and unclearly.

If you think that that's what he did. To say just the other day, somebody on a YouTube comment on the thing, you know, this guy doesn't believe the

Bible. He shouldn't be in ministry. To say that about Lig Duncan, who's been faithfully ministering the gospel for 40 years. You know,

I've never said that about you guys when I disagreed with you. When Thabiti started going off the rails,

I didn't say that about him. You know, maybe I showed my hand a little too much there. But no, no.

Think of it this way. Those comments are comments that I think are to be regretted.

Okay, you don't go after people on a personal level. Yeah. Calling them names. It shouldn't be scurrilous.

What does that mean? It shouldn't be. You shouldn't be throwing rotten vegetables and dead cats at someone because they did something.

You should engage with the point. Yeah. So all of that, that is given.

But I think that the fact that it happened to you, people were attacking

Lig. We'll say one of our parishioners piled into one comment thread,

I think, on Facebook and said, hey, with all the stuff about Lig, and I agree with you shouldn't have done it, but please remember the fifth commandment.

Praise God. And for us, like we'd happily, if we could get on a stage, we would.

Have that conversation. Or if we could get in a room, you know, there's no bad blood. Yeah. There's disagreement.

We'd serve the Lord's Supper to him. Yeah. We'd host him. We'd serve all of that. So the people who are descending into personal abuse are not representing us.

Okay? And I would say that those people have a problem that they need to address with God.

But there is, I want to zoom out and say, there's also a larger cultural problem.

And that cultural problem is that we are that we have a population in America where the rank and file normies are beyond exasperated.

We are on the verge of civil war. So, so the thing, the kind of thing that I'm afraid.

You really mean that? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely mean it. And the kind of thing when people come unstuck in a

YouTube comment thread, which is that's what you do there. I'm trying to learn the customs of your people.

Sociologists. To do that. That's quite honestly, that's the least of our worries. Right. That's the, that's the canary in the mine.

That's the initial indicators that we are hanging by a thread. And I've got much,

I've got much bigger fish. Yeah. It's a symptom, not a. It's a symptom, not the root problem. The root problem is that we're dealing with two

Americas. The one, one America is at war with normal as it is at war with God's natural revelation,

God's special revelation, the way God assigned us our chromosomes. There's a section of the country, many of them in positions of influence and power who are hell bent on jamming that down everybody's throats.

And the people who are reacting this way are reacting because they have not been equipped by their pastors.

They've not been taught by their pastors how to react. They've not been equipped in worldview thinking.

They've all they know is that everything is going desperately, terribly wrong. Everything I loved is going away.

And everywhere I look, evangelical leaders are compromising with it.

So just to go back to the earlier point about the word nuance, because this is where we are. Yeah. The last 15 people that this

Joe Schmo heard use the word nuance were part of this great betrayal.

Now they're gay. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's part of the great betrayal. Yeah. And then you come on and you're not doing that.

Yeah. But they lump you in with it. Yeah. And I'm like, guys, I don't want to let the left have the word nuance. Right. Just like I don't want them to have the word justice.

Right. It's not their word. It's my word. But I would say, yes. But you have to. But you have to recognize the world you're living in.

Right. If there are 12 clowns in a circus ring and they're cavorting and doing somersaults. Yeah. You can get down there and start quoting

Shakespeare. But to the audience, you're the 13th clown. Right. Did you just think of that?

What's that? No, I've used it before. If you put all these in a book, the world would have not enough room for all of them.

All right. So basically to the audience, you're the 13th clown. Yeah. Because you have to have the gravitas to be able to change the whole circus.

So you can't just do a podcast that's self -contained.

Sure. In the circus that's going on. Yeah. And if something catches fire, you know, like Alistair...

Begg. Alistair Begg's thing. Yeah. He did this thing. Yeah. And it catches fire. Yeah. Or Nancy's spanking video catches fire.

You never know what it is that's going to catch fire and go. And when it catches fire and goes, the volatility of the population is the problem.

And that has been the direct result of concerted long -term strategy on the part of the left.

True. And we need to attack that. We need to get out there. More time attacking that than the symptoms.

And I think one thing on those reactions to bringing the fifth commandment, some of what was going on there is you have a bunch of people who have benefited for the last 20 plus years from, say,

Doug's ministry in equipping them, in helping them to parent and helping to think clearly about the world. They've benefited greatly.

And then it looked like Lig just insulted their dad. Yeah, right. Right. And like took cheap shots at their dad.

And so all of the defensiveness that you would feel in that comes blurting out. In a place, in anonymity.

Right. And so it's the sort of, there's me kind of trying to understand where it's coming from.

And still want to say, don't be a 12 year old who's, you know, fighting because somebody said something about your dad.

Peace, Eustace. Do not scold like a kitchen girl. Yeah, right. No warrior scolds. No warrior. Shakespeare? Narnia.

Narnia. Last battle. Okay, this question comes from a mutual friend.

I texted him today and I said, hey, I know that you love and support these guys. But I also know that you're a straight shooter.

What is one question in the vein of a critique that you think I should be sure to ask?

So here's what he sent me. Is there anything at all in the Young's Moscow Mood article that makes you think maybe he's got a point here?

Is there anything at all to acknowledge as a fair critique that you could learn from? I would say he absolutely has a point.

Not maybe has a point. Okay. But this goes back to what I was saying earlier about speaking to tens of thousands of people.

Okay. So the things that he's describing and the reactions that he's, possible reactions to things that we do,

I don't have any doubt at all that he's seen those sorts of things with his own eyes. Right.

So I'm not, I wouldn't dispute the facts of the case. So. This may be the attribution.

Well, no, it's what it has to do is if there's 10 ,000 people and 150 of them reacted in this way, 1 ,200 reacted in this way.

And remember the target, who am I writing for? Okay.

I've got one person in mind and I've had that person in mind for three decades or more.

This is who I'm always writing for. Um, and Kevin DeYoung is not necessarily, he's not under no obligation to write for my audience.

He's writing for his audience, right? And, and when what I say lands wrong with someone

I wasn't writing for, that might be a collateral damage thing that I regret, or it might,

I might not mind ticking that person off, but I'm not, I was not attempting that.

When he says, here's the, here's a problem with what Wilson's doing and he describes what's happening over here.

I don't have any problem accepting that. Yes. I think that it's not just, maybe he has a point.

I think he certainly has a point. That was a lot. Could you, could you in more succinctly say that?

Think about it this way. If you've got a target audience, so Kevin has a target audience that he's trying to encourage and strengthen.

And in trying to encourage and strengthen that audience, say he alienates a different one and then we criticized him for the alienation.

Look, you alienated this person. Yeah. You would just say, okay, yeah, we did. We weren't trying to, but we did.

That was a, in some cases it's a unfortunate by -product. In some cases it was part of the point. So you, you actually do roll the grenade in there because you want it to blow up because the reaction is actually what helps other people see what's going on.

Okay. On that note, my next question about the obligatory nature of debate and your guys' follow -up video to the article, you guys said the ball's in play.

You don't, you don't get to throw the ball into the field and say, you know, you know, ball's not in play, ball's in play. I'm not so sure that that's true.

Here's my thoughts on it. You guys critique me, give me pushback. I think it is at least valid to say

I don't support the sort of Moscow mood project. And I think that the way that the project continues to gain steam is through kerfuffles, you know?

So therefore, strategically, I don't want to have a back and forth. I don't want to do a debate.

I'm not trying to, I'm not actually trying to like win over Doug Wilson or the

Moscovites. I'm actually just trying to warn people sort of more broadly to like be careful of this.

And I kind of don't care whether or not they want to engage in it. That's not really what I'm trying to do here. Right. Thoughts on that?

Yeah. The thought would be, we have not grown and expanded our influence because of the kerfluffles.

We've grown and expanded our influence by steadily doing what we do and being ignored and shut out.

Okay. But let's just say that you were to grant him that. To say like, I think that that is one of the main planks in their strategies.

And I don't want to give that to them. I mean, is that fair? Yeah, there's a fair point where that's one of the things that trolls do.

Don't feed the trolls. Don't be a troll. If a troll gets into a Twitter spat with Elon Musk, that's going to make his day.

Yeah. He started with 25 followers and he fell into a chocolate pie.

So yeah, there is a universe in which it would be appropriate to say, here are my concerns.

Everybody be warned. These are the concerns. So if you listen to me and respect my judgment, that's all

I have to say. And I'm not interested in getting into it with the Moscow guys.

Yeah. Okay. There is a world in which that would be a fair thing to do. Okay. But I don't think that that's the situation we're actually in.

Okay. Because when people are at the tennis match looking here this way, this way, this way, this way,

I don't think it's an effective thing to do. If I were advising

Kevin DeYoung, I would say, look, I really think you need to have a discussion with these guys.

And the discussion is going to prove, establish to a bunch of people on our side, that you're not semi -woke.

Right? Because when you shut people out, when you don't talk to them, when there's no interaction and the people on both sides are, they've got a numerous enough following or their ministries are formidable enough to matter, right?

Okay. And you have the exchange. What you're doing is heading off misunderstandings.

What would happen is he would be saying, okay, Kevin DeYoung, by talking with us, would be acknowledging publicly that we're not orcs.

And we would be acknowledging publicly that he's not woke or headed there. Sure. Right?

And then peace and harmony would break out. And that's not to certain people's advantage. And it's just been within the last year that it's like a memo went out after years and years of my name not being mentioned, my not being retweeted or quoted, years and years and years of that.

Within the last year, all of a sudden, Russell Moore names me aspiring theocrat in Christianity Today.

The New York Times names me. Kevin DeYoung names me. The Moscow, you know, it's...

Why do you think that is? I think it's because our influence has grown to such an extent that the people in the big evil world or the standard reformed evangelical world are getting asked about us all the time.

And I think they've realized that they've got to say something.

So it's... I think in a lot of places, there's guys who are in that next generation who are like, given that we do actually have orcs out there who are at war with reality, why are we doing this really weird fight thing amongst...

Why are certain people embargoed and quarantined when they can be... When they're helpful, I'm getting help with my... You know, somebody starts recommending a book at one of these churches, like a parenting book.

And now you've got people who... Now it's become an issue. So it's bubbling up from within. So it no longer can be ignored.

But the problem is that because they built that wall so high to, again, to make it face to face and to treat it like another brother where you could just have the disagreement and then move on would be to sort of walk back something that they are not in a position to walk back.

Doug, I know a man who once said that you are not qualified to be an elder because you're quarrelsome.

Yeah. Uh, not that you are mean or mean spirited, but that there's not a fight that happens in evangelicalism without you kind of always having a comment about it.

What would you say to that? Uh, quarrelsome would be, um, when you get into quarrels.

Uh, debating is when you get into debates. Okay. So, um, quarrelsome would be, um, well, in the first Timothy three and Titus one, an elder must not be...

Quarrelsome. Must not be quarrelsome. Must not be that way. And I take that very seriously and don't quarrel with my wife and don't quarrel with my friends and don't, you know,

I'm not, uh, I don't quarrel with my fellow elders. I don't, you know, it's, it's not a part of my disposition.

It's not part of the pattern of my life. And when I'm in a debate, it's like online, it's as though there's a battle and I go to the armory and I get my weapons and I go to the battle and I fight because in the battle with the, uh, the weaponry that God authorizes us to use and I do fight, right?

And then I take the weapons back to the armory and then I go home to my wife and kids and don't quarrel.

So the, I think it would be a mistake to take someone's demeanor and attitude on the battlefield as a snapshot of the way they talk to their mom.

Is there, is there a battle that you come across that you choose not to enter into the fray of? Absolutely.

Okay. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. So if you're prolific, you know what

I mean? You're, you're involved in a lot. Right. I, I, I write a lot, but I tell, I tell people that I write,

I write for the same reason that dogs bark. I, I just, I love to write. I love to think out loud.

I love to, I love to write. And a lot of the writing is not polemical.

It's analysis and working through arguments and, and then if I get attacked, I will answer.

And I always try to answer in a way that's commensurate with the kind of attack, right?

So there was recently, uh, um, an article in Themelios about, um, post -millennialism, which

I responded to, but it was a friendly response. Yeah. You know, um, there's no reason to fight with people you don't want to fight with.

Yeah. Right. But if someone is advocating something that I think is dangerous to the flock,

I'm a shepherd and shepherds fight. So basically I, I don't feel bad about fighting at all, as long as I'm fighting wolves or fellow shepherds who are letting the wolves in.

Switching gears a little bit. Joe, you on a recent interview had a really interesting take on Big Eva.

Can you repeat that again? You're, you're the. Yeah. I think sometimes people make

Big Eva into this like really big backroom conspiratorial thing. Um, when in reality, what it is, is it's a bunch of guys are friends and that everybody has it.

It's just a natural feature where you're friends with someone and therefore you trust their judgment. And so if they say, um, you're friends with someone and they say that guy's trouble, you're just going to be inclined to trust them because they're your friends.

And a lot of that happens here. Right. Exactly. Oh, for sure. Is he solid? Is he, yeah, is he solid? Any concerns there that, and so it's, it's a very normal thing.

Um, and then the, the reason it has traction though, is because sometimes it's unclear for, for lay people, what the criteria is for why certain people are in and out.

Right. So, um, why'd that guy get invited? Why does he get a pass? Why is that? Okay. And it begins to look like it's more deliberate and, and people are prone to project more, um, malice than is necessary that it must be some deep, you know, deep animosity and malice that's animating it as opposed to simply more informal, friendly sorts of stuff.

So that's, I mean, that's, that's what's going on in a lot of the big Eva conversation. Another thing that came up in your,

I think Lig said this in the interview, that there are other ministries that are way bigger, way bigger death on the gospel coalition.

So why, um, and I would say big Eva is not the biggest. Yeah. And big reformed

Eva, very small. Yeah. Very, very small. But the, the big

Eva vibe is big. Eva is in my mind, the cool kids.

Okay. Okay. Is there the downstream descendants of young, restless and reformed?

And it's a, it's a coolness vibe. Focus on the family is bigger.

Ken Ham's a Genesis thing. Way bigger. Yeah. But Ken Ham, Ken Ham is never going to be among the cool kids.

Right. Ever. He's a fundamentalist who believes Genesis.

So it's just not going to happen. So the, and I think this is part of the, um, part of the reason why there's a quickness to hostility in the, in the kickback against big

Eva is because big Eva has, has exuded for some years now, an elitist vibe.

Okay. It's respectable. What's that? Respectable. Respectable, elitist, polished, slick, cool.

And a lot of the people out in the country have just about had it with that. Yeah. And they're against all elites.

They're against, and because we are in a populist uprising, the political realm and in the theological realm, there's a populist uprising.

Which is dangerous. Which is dangerous. I mean, there's good things that can come of it, but it's also really dangerous. Yes. Reactionary populist movements don't typically end well.

Correct. Yeah. Um, and so there's big, big problems with it, but that's how it goes.

That's how it goes. Yeah. That's how it goes. Guys, uh, I want to be respectful of your time. I have like five or six more questions.

How are we doing? How much longer do we have? 10 minutes. All right. Joe, can you, uh,

I like how you got the good cop, bad cop. Doug's like, I'll go all night. And he's like, you got 10 minutes. Joe, can you just speak a little bit about, uh, your transition from Bethlehem to Moscow?

Cause I'm not going to say it was like cloak and dagger, but it was a big thing. A lot of people didn't really know why.

Yeah. Yeah. Sort of the precipitating cause, um, was, um, differences of opinion with leaders about substantive issues like political philosophy.

Um, so political philosophy was sort of the presenting issue, um, which wasn't a new thing for me, but I think the wider conversation about Christendom, Christian nationalism sort of put that on the radar.

The Overton window. Yeah. So all of a sudden that's, that's the, that's the discussion that we're having. And so as we're having that discussion and I'm, I've been more

Protestant, classic, reformed, magisterial, two kingdoms. And as I was getting asked now to speak publicly as the president of the school in various forums and articulating that there was concern that that was going to be sort of representative of the school.

And it wasn't sort of where certain leaders in the school wanted the school to be. Um, and so because it, so part of it was,

I was president, part of it was the substantive issue. And as we, the more we talked, the wider the divide got, we got the clarity and it was,

Oh, we're actually farther apart. Sure. And so as we, as my wife and I wrestled through that, it became evident that, um, this, uh, there's no reason to Bethlehem's a great institution.

They have in their own identity. Um, some of it had to do with Moscow mood sort of stuff about, you know, how much, how, how influenced have

I been? Do I want to bring that, that ethos? Do I want to bring Moscow mood to Minneapolis? Um, which was a hard question for me to answer at the time because I was like, well,

I, I'm not trying to, but I'm not, not trying to either. Right. I was like, I didn't have as a principle, whatever

I do, I must not be like Moscow. That was not on the radar. And so in that environment, being asked to lead institution, it was like,

I don't know how to do this well with that sort of pressure and that sort of expectation.

Right. Because it's trying to thread a needle that I don't value. I'm not trying to avoid that.

Yeah. Um, and so in wrestling through it, it became evident that like, I, I just fit better here. Like I, like I did.

Um, I like the Moscow mood. I like the build and fight. That's what I wanted to do. Like Idaho.

Yeah. I'd ever never, I'd been out here. I went to school here, uh, distance and came out and we've been friends for 15 years or so.

Um, so I had lots of friends and relationships, but it was, and it was clear that, um,

Bethlehem can be Bethlehem and it was just, I, I fit better. And so in the course of that, it was, um,

I'm going to step down. I want the school to succeed. I want Bethlehem to flourish and thrive under Piper's leadership and everything else and praying that that happens.

Um, and then I can sort of be myself and do, you know, do ministry in the way that I want to do it.

Andy Nacelli is still recovering from your departure, brother. Andy's a good friend. A good, good brother.

Amazing thinker, incredible writer. Uh, one more question before we get into the rapid fire questions,

Doug, you have been very calculated in your use of profanity. Uh, what would you say to Christians who just cuss?

Not, they're not using it like to make a point serrated edge. They just cuss. I would say, stop it.

Just stop it. Um, um, Bob Newhart. So basically in English, this is the overview in English.

There are, um, there's swearing, there's cursing, there's obscenity and there's vulgarity.

Okay. Swearing is taking the name of God, um, swearing an oath.

Cursing is consigning someone, uh, anathema or go to hell.

The obscenity is sexual, uh, sexual nature, uh, something that ought to be off stage.

And then vulgarity would be junior high bathroom humor. Yeah. Right. So, uh, all four of those, you can find, um, prohibitions in scripture of those things.

Um, the one of the 10 commandments, do not take the name of the Lord, your God in vain. Swearing is breaking one of the 10 commandments.

Cursing, their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Um, obscenity. Um, it's shameful to mention what the disobedient do in secret.

Um, vulgarity, uh, avoid coarse jesting in Ephesians. So, uh, all four.

Okay. Don't talk that way. So, uh, I would, I would take the list of all those passages to the people who are there.

I saw a t -shirt. I'm a Christian. I love Jesus, but I cuss a little. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I'd say just, you shouldn't.

Yeah. Um, your, your speech be gracious, seasoned with salt. Yeah. Um, basically stop it.

Um, yeah. And then someone say, so what are you doing then? Uh -huh. Right.

Which would be a fair question. Would be a fair question. Every one of those four things, um, we see examples of people in the

Bible, um, swearing. Um, Paul swears as God is my witness, um,

God confines no one greater to swear by. So he swore by himself. Um, so there's a righteous swearing.

There's a righteous cursing. If anyone does not love the Lord Jesus Christ, then let him be accursed. Let him be accursed.

If we are an angel from heaven, preach to you another gospel, let him be accursed. Obscenity, uh,

Ezekiel has some, Ezekiel has some passages that I do not expect to ever preach on.

Yeah. Right. Because he's, he's way out there. And even with the translators tidying him up.

So Ezekiel uses calculated righteous obscenity. Right. And then vulgarity, the same sort of thing.

Isaiah, our righteousness is like filthy rags is a used menstrual. Paul and Philippians.

There are righteous examples of all four. And so I believe that the rule for using them, using such words ought to be sparingly.

Because if you do it all the time, you're debasing the currency. Yeah, that's right. You lose the, the throw weight of the expression.

It ought to be on occasions that you've, uh, that are analogous to the scriptural occasions.

So you made reference to my use of the C word, um, which I will say the C word here, because it wasn't, this is not the occasion.

That's right. That I was, that I was using. As fits the occasion. As fits the occasion. It's very important. Right. So when

I was, um, engaging with a couple of feminists who were, had, one of them had melted down purity rings that Christian girls had turned into her and turned it into a little bowling trophy, um, uh, vagina and, and was awarding that little bowling trophy to Gloria Steinem.

What they, what they were doing was reducing women to that. That's what they were doing.

And so my use of it was, I simply stepped, this was a reductio. I stepped into their argument and said, what you're saying is that women are just this, that's what you're saying.

And it was like a punch in the mouth. And it was on purpose sparing. I've never used that word before or since, you know, it's just not part of my discourse, but it was fully appropriate in that moment.

So basically now I can understand someone saying, yeah, I don't buy it and say, okay, great.

But I've done my best to show you. This is my reasoning. And I want you to acknowledge that I'm not simply swinging my liberty to cuss around on the end of a rope.

That's right. Right. It's a very calculated, I take the tool out of the toolbox, use it and put it back.

It's an active, and it's an active translation. Here's what they were saying with statues. I'm just going to put it in English. And the other thing that was in play there was, um, evangelical organizations sort of scratching their chins and taking it seriously.

Right. I think at the time Whitehorse Inn or somebody like that was sort of dignifying this and saying, what can we learn from this?

Is this a, should we learn something here about purity culture? And so they're looking at this appalling display and sort of, and they're nuancing it.

Right. This would be a good example of like, we're going to nuance this. And then Doug came in with some clarity and said, this is what they're saying.

Do we really want to nuance this? One of my goals, one of my goals in life is to smell like burnt marsh wiggle, burnt marsh wiggle,

Narnia, Narnia. Okay, man, you guys rapid fire questions. This can go as quickly as you want them to go.

As long as we stay within the 10 consigned minutes, which I think it's three now. Tea or coffee? Tea.

Coffee. Have either of you guys watched The Office? The Office, the show? Yes. Oh yeah.

Okay. All right. If you could only be trapped with the collected works of any theologian on an island, but just their works and nobody else's, who would it be?

Yeah. Chesterton said, uh, Goldwyn's Guide to Shipbuilding. If I, if I had to,

I would say Calvin's Institutes. You could have his whole collected works. It doesn't just have to be the

Institutes. Oh yeah. So not just one book, all the collected works. I'd say

Lewis. Yeah.

Probably still Calvin. I'd still Calvin. Yeah. Uh, mountains or beach? For vacation, you mean?

Whatever you can take that however you want. Mountains. Mountains. Uh, champagne or wine? Wine. Champagne.

Ooh, fancy. Uh, least favorite candy? Least favorite candy? Least. Oh. I'm searching for an answer here.

I hope you give it to me. Beef bar. Oh, okay. Anything with coconut. Black licorice right here.

Uh, Android or iPhone? iPhone. iPhone. Macaroni salad or potato salad?

Potato. Oh, potato salad. This one's real fancy. Foie gras or escargot? Oh man.

I know you guys probably know that. I abominate both of them. Right. I'd do escargot. Night out. I don't even know what foie gras is. Night out or night in?

In. In. Concert or football game? Football game. What kind of concert?

Any kind of concert you want. Well. Lady Gaga. Taylor Swift. I would say, um, man, that's a tie.

Okay, all right. I'll go with football game. Morning person or night owl? Morning. Morning.

As you get older, more? Or have you always been morning person? I've always been morning, but I'm getting more and more morning.

Burger King or McDonald's? And you have to choose. McDonald's. Burger King. Mexican or Italian?

Mexican. Mexican. So they're your least favorite? No, favorite. Oh, the race or the food?

Was the government involved in 9 -11? Burger or barbecue? Burger.

Uh, burger. Chinese takeout and not the good stuff. I'm talking like it's 2 a .m. You can only get really bad.

Chinese takeout or sushi? Oh, never sushi. Never sushi. But it's got the

Chinese takeout has to have enough MSG to make the spoon taste good. That's what I'm talking about. Yeah, that's the magic sauce.

Rock or rap? Rock. I can't handle rap. Can't handle rap.

Did you ever get into any of like the lyrical theology? No, there's some species of rap that I think is very impressive.

Yeah. I think it's just very impressive. Yeah. But I'm a classic rock guy. Peaked in the late 90s. Classical or jazz?

Classical. Classical. I'm surprised you had to think so long about it. Jazz is terrible. Well, because it depends.

If you put either jazz, if you put it on for like four hours.

Yeah. Sunday afternoon. After about two hours, I'm ready to be done. And it's the second.

I can love classical music and I do, but I can't take. A lot of it. I can't take the long haul.

Okay, we're out of time. So let me just finish these up. One systematic theology on an island.

I think you already gave your answer, Calvin's. Probably Calvin.

Yeah. Which hymn do you want to be sung at your funeral? All hail the power of Jesus name.

All hail the power of Jesus name. No, the other one. All hail the power of Jesus name.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Different tune. Yeah. Be thou my vision.

So good. How many holes does a straw have? How many what?

How many holes does a straw have? Just one hole. All the way through. You sure about that? All the way through. If a lizard loses his tail, where does he go get another one?

Retail store. Dang it, man. All right, guys, that's all

I have. I'm supremely thankful for this conversation. I pray the Lord blesses it for the good of his people, for the glory of his name.

Doug, will you close in prayer, brother? Sure. Thank you. Our Father God, we thank you for your goodness to us. We are very grateful.

I pray that you would use this conversation to bless your saints. I pray that it would be instructive and corrective and encouraging in all the different ways it needs to be.

We're very grateful for our brother coming all this way. And I pray that you bless his labors, bless his ministry, bless his work.

Pray in Jesus name. Amen. Amen. At 10 of those, we want to serve the local church by equipping your church family with great resources that are going to point them to Jesus.

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