The Driving Line 5/3/2023

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James discusses current events while he is on the road.

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Well, greetings and welcome to the driving line. A little bit weird to be doing this today because we're going to do a dividing line here in just a couple of hours.
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Well, Lord willing. In fact, let me mention real quickly on that front. Really, really disappointed that we didn't get to do it yesterday, our first one from the new studio, but the bandwidth, it was just the location.
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And that forced us, I think that was providential, that forced us to look at other ways of doing things.
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We had picked up Starlink last year. Rich didn't like it. And we never really did much to see if there was some way to improve it.
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And so now I think we're going to really have to think along those lines. From what he says, even when it has freeze frames as far as the video goes, the audio stays solid and that's 99 % of the time, that's all that really matters.
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So we'll have that as a backup for tonight. Should the bandwidth in the, whether it's from the camp
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WiFi, which last night was not existent, or cellular, we have a 5G unit in the
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RV, doesn't work for us, then we'll go with Starlink and we'll do what we need to do.
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Anyway, so I'm sure Rich is going to be annoyed that he has to get this thing posted even before the dividing line, but we do need to do it that way.
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I wanted to do a quick commentary in light of what happened yesterday and this morning.
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Believe me, I see everybody saying, I'm just going to mute
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Christian nationalism on my Twitter feed. Okay, believe me, I get it. The problem is,
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I think it's being handled really poorly in general from a number of different perspectives.
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But we cannot escape the reality of Washington State and Minnesota is going to,
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California, all the leftist states will be doing the same thing. We are well past the tipping point in our society where evil is being promoted in an amazing fashion.
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And I can't leave my phone up there, it will fry in the sun. Anyway, the little phrase,
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Christ or chaos, isn't just a nice short phrase, it's true.
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And there's a reason why it's true. It's true because we live in God's world designed on the basis of God's will.
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He's our creator, he's made us. And our society has decided that every single good thing he's given to us, husbands and wives, grandfathers and grandmothers, grandkids, being a son or a daughter, sisters, brothers, human sexuality, holding a newborn baby, everything that is good and beautiful, our society decided we are going to destroy everything.
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Everything. It's the chaos part. And we are in that transition period and it's rapidly accelerating.
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We can't avoid dealing with these issues. We cannot avoid dealing with what is the church's role when a society is committing complete suicide?
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Do we just sit back and go, yeah, that's it, that's going to happen, that's cool. And what do you do when the state comes after your kids?
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What do you say to evil governors and evil mayors when they are promoting this kind of utter self -destructive insanity?
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Do we say anything? Or is it just, well, you'd do a lot better if you were a
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Christian? Do we communicate to them the content of what
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God's law says is their responsibility that they will be judged for? Or do you even believe they'll be judged for it?
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I know Christians that do not believe that mayors and legislators and governors and presidents and everything else, that they will be judged for what they did in those offices.
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I do know people who believe that. I don't know how you read scripture. Well, okay, you just, well,
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I was going to say, you certainly have to skip all the prophets. But no, you go to the
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New Testament and Paul's talking to, you know, Festus and Felix and whoever will listen as to what their responsibility for God is and the coming judgment.
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So there's just no way to get around it. We have to be doing these things. It's our calling.
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So we need to have thought through the ramifications of the pushback. What more do people say than the pushback?
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So anyway, I know that right now a lot of people are burned out on the subject.
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I get it. But there are things happening that I think need to be discussed and thought about now rather than waiting until they get really, really bad a little bit later on.
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So yesterday, the Canon Press dropped the recording of Doug Wilson and I chatting about his new book,
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Mere Christendom. Now, Mere Christendom is a phrase that Doug's been using for a long, long time. I don't like the phrase as a
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Baptist. As a church historian, it seems to me that Christendom as a term is generally used to refer to lots of periods of time in the history of the church that really, really are embarrassing.
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Bad things happened in defense of quote -unquote Christendom. So you got to get over some serious barriers to discuss quote -unquote
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Christendom. But it's something Doug does. I read his book. I listened to his book actually.
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I hear where he's coming from. I agree with a vast majority of what he's saying.
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We have magistrates today and they have no grounds to stand on.
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They have no morals. They have no objective truths. They have no objective ethics.
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They got nothing. And their worldview provides them with nothing. They're stuck.
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And so what do we do? What can we do? What must we do? Okay. But there are issues.
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And so I raised the issue of sacralism. Now, anybody, the group that went with me in 2017 to Germany knows the very first night in Berlin, I talked about sacralism.
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I talked about the fact that many of the men that we are going to be studying, we'll be seeing the events of their life, where it happened, things like that, would never have extended to us the right hand of fellowship.
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In fact, they would have kicked us out of their cities or maybe burned us to the stake.
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And there were lots of people in the room that were just sort of looking at me. And now, just for open revelation here, that tour that we did was led, was done by Sovereign Cruises, Sovereign Luxury Experiences, whatever the term was.
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And hence, Michael Fallon was with us. Michael Fallon arranged, if you've seen the picture of me preaching from Luther's pulpit in the
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Castle Church in Wittenberg, Mike arranged that. That was a bucket list thing to do,
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I can assure you, to actually preach from Luther's pulpit, not just, I didn't just deliver a lecture,
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I preached a sermon from Luther's pulpit. And that was a tremendous, tremendous privilege and honor and everything else.
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I'm very thankful to Mike for arranging that. But after I gave that presentation in Berlin, he and his staff, they sort of waved me over and they're like, man, we've done this with a lot of big names.
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I could name some of the names they've done this with. No one's ever said that.
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I've never said what? Well, about the Reformers and the fact that they, you know, would have maybe like killed you, you know.
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And I'm like, well, but that's the truth. There's no way around that.
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That's the reality. And if you don't tell the whole truth, you're creating a caricature.
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It's a cartoon version of the Reformation, not the real things. You just got to understand, man. And again, we can go over the names.
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They just, they never talk about the Reformers in that way. It's always just all the positives.
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Well, there's plenty of positive, but you've got to tell the truth about what's going on and about how sacralism impacted the church and the
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Reformation and the direction of the Reformation, the speed of the Reformation, all of that.
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And so, you know, this is nothing new to me. I was talking about sacralism, the very first church history class
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I ever taught at Grand Canyon College. I had just been made scholar -in -residence by Dr.
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Bill Williams, and I taught church history. And we went over sacralism.
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We went over the church -state relationship, Constantinianism, how that developed, all that kind of stuff.
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Now, that was in a context. And I'm not saying that the context of Wittenberg is identical to the context today.
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But I am saying that if we're going to look to the past for how Christians in the past have dealt with things, to try to gain wisdom, not simply to slavishly follow them, but to go, okay, this is how they did things in the past.
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This is what they were thinking. This is what the results were. Then we've got to, we've got to honestly deal with Fritz Erbe or Jan Hutter or the very large number of Baptist martyrs who died not just at the hands of the inquisitors of Rome, which they did, but also at the hands of Bible -believing
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Reformed Orthodox men who burned fellow
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Christians at the stake and believed they were doing
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Christ's will. They believed they were doing Christ's will. And so we have to talk about, okay, how do you keep that from happening again?
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Because that wasn't Christ's will. And if you say it wasn't Christ's will, then you've got to answer the question, how could they have known that at that time?
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And so we had that conversation. And I thought it was a helpful conversation. Well, so that drops.
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That goes out on the internet. And only a few hours later, here is this, and I was sent it,
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I didn't see it, but here is this conversation between the two wolves,
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William and Stephen, and they're, and I could, again,
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I'm driving right now, so it's best not to pull up graphics and screenshots and stuff like that, just simply for safety's sake.
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But William has said, sacralism isn't a thing.
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Now, I, you know, I'm not a big fan of modern slang, youthful slang, whatever, but you're left to interpret that.
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It's not a thing. Well, of course it's a thing. I mean, and it's a relevant thing.
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And anybody who's talking about Christendom, anyone who's talking about Christian nationalism, whatever, you have to deal with what has happened in the past when a specific relationship developed that blurred the lines between church and state.
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And we can talk about sphere sovereignty, but you have to talk about where you're getting that, and why didn't the sacralist reformers get the same thing then?
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Why didn't they understand that? Why didn't they practice that? You know,
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Doug has talked about flogging Baptists, okay? And he says, we shouldn't flog Baptists.
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Well, they didn't just flog Baptists. They cut Baptist tongues out and burned them at the stake.
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They drowned them in the river in Zurich, gave them their third baptism. So, what happened then?
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Why did that happen then? How can you avoid that? What's the foundation? This is important stuff.
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And here's William Wolfe going, sacralism isn't a thing. And then the other Wolfe, the author of the book, for crying out loud, responds to him by saying,
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I've never even heard anybody use that term. I think James White made it up. Really?
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Okay. I made it up. I probably first heard it, read it from Leonard Verdine when
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I read Reformers and Their Stepchildren, Anatomy of a Hybrid, met the man, talked to the man.
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He was over 100 years old when I met him, sharp as a tack. In fact, I'll go ahead and tell the story.
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I met him at his home in Apache Junction. I think it's where he died. He was at least, he was 101 or 103.
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I forget which one it was. This was in the early 90s, probably 1990 itself. And he gave me a quote from Luther off the top of his head.
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And I was surprised. I'd never seen it. I said, Luther said that? He gets this twinkle in his eye. He says, would you like the quotation in German, Latin, or Dutch?
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And he wasn't talking about digging out some papers. He was talking about giving me the quotation in German, Latin, or Dutch.
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He had it memorized in all three. Over 100 years old. Brilliant man. And that's probably where I first heard it.
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So 30, almost 35 years ago was probably when
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I was introduced to the term initially. And so the idea that I made it up, it's just, it's so silly.
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It's childish. But it's coming from the guy who wrote the book. And you can't have thought through the issue of Christian nationalism without thinking through the issues of sacralism.
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And if you haven't even exposed yourself to a wide variety of opinions in that area, then aren't you saying my book on this subject is just simply my thoughts.
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It's really not thought through. I mean, I was stunned. I really was.
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And so I responded to the tweets and said, sacralism is a thing.
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Sacralism is what put Fritz Erba in a hole for seven years until he died. And I linked to the video
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I did at the castle, the Wartburg Castle. And it is ironic, certainly not planned, that standing right next to me in the video is
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Josh Bice because he was on the same trip. And the person recording the video was
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Michael Fallon. All right. Again, just for full revelation here.
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And then I also linked to the talk that I gave on Lutheran sacralism on Reformation Day, October 31st, 2017.
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And so you can listen to both of those. So this is not anything new. And Stephen Wolf's like, well,
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I don't listen to your content. Well, that's nice. I don't care. This has nothing to do with my content.
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This has to do with important issues that must be thought through by serious thinkers, serious
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Christian thinkers. So this morning, and it was a lengthy thread, and so probably want to work through all of it.
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But again, wisdom not to look it up right now, even though traffic is light. Anyway, it's very windy though.
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Stephen Wolf has a series of tweets that to me is very, very important because basically what he's saying is, look, you know, if this is really going to happen, it can't be based upon just simply an exegetical argument from post -millennialists.
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But it has to deal with natural laws. He is a Thomist. He's a
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Thomist. And it's all of a sudden, oh, well, I knew that before.
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I knew that. And I'm like, and I knew that from the book. And I'm like, yeah, you know, this is relevant to what we've been debating in another arena for quite some time in regards to natural theology, natural revelation, natural law versus special revelation and sufficiency of scripture.
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And it's really obvious, painfully obvious that the issues related to sacralism,
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Thomas, Aristotle, Roman Catholicism, the role of church and state that grew out of that and Thomas's importance in that, these are all connected, big time connected.
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And so if that's where Wolf is coming from, then we've got to go, hey, wait a minute. When this was tried before and you had this concept of natural law,
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Aristotle's not only metaphysics, but teachings on morality and ethics and things like that.
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And what came of all of that was a mess, a real mess.
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And so even if you go, yeah, you know, Christendom 2 .0, it sounds like a good idea.
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That thunk was a big old honking bug. You know, it's spring in Texas, I'm doing 70 miles an hour, it's 10 miles an hour below the speed limit, but still at 70 miles per hour, some of these bugs hit and it's just, yeah, it leaves a mark.
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Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh, yeah. Clearly, if we're going to talk about Christendom 2 .0,
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and if you might go, you know, that's what we need. Okay, but the only way that works, and this is what
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Doug and I were saying, so you can disagree with Doug and I if you want to, but the only way that actually comes into practice in a meaningful fashion is as a result of a massive work of the
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Spirit of God. We're talking massive revival.
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We're talking sweeping move with the Spirit of God, changing hearts and minds.
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Because you see, that's not what you had with Christendom 1 .0. You had natural law, and you had that whole concept, and that's what led to things like the
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Inquisition. That's what led to men claiming the name of Christ while torturing other men who claimed the name of Christ and thinking they're doing the right thing.
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That's central. You can't skip that, for crying out loud. You can't just put that off to the side.
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So, it just seems to me, what we've watched over the past couple weeks is just some, if you can't help but cancel someone like myself, who's a theonomic post -millennialist, for crying out loud.
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If you can't keep me in the camp, give it up. Give it up, because you're going to end up with a
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Christian nationalist movement that can meet for your national convention in the back room at the
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Holiday Inn. You're not building consensus.
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You're not making your case in such a fashion as to change hearts and minds and to build foundations.
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Look, the post -millennial hope results in a person being willing to lay foundations that they know will not end up with a building on them for quite some time.
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That's not what I'm seeing. I'm not seeing that level of maturity. I'm not seeing that level of patience.
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I'm seeing a bunch of young guys who are building a brand and building an audience, and if they want to get offensive, they don't care if they're talking about their elders.
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They don't care if they're talking about people from whom they have learned theology in the past.
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They're willing to cancel anybody who will not agree with them on every jot and tittle right now, and that is foolishness.
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That is foolishness. I'm telling you right now, that is the way to make this entire conversation a complete joke in ten years.
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Ten years from now, people will be sitting around going, yeah, remember that one? Wow, boy, those guys went off the rails, didn't they?
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Oh yeah, wow, you know. That's how to do it. That's how to do it. I listened to the statement, and I agree with the vast majority of that statement, and I think it would be really worthwhile for everybody, even the people who are burned out, to think through what it says, to have discussions about it.
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I was thinking about doing that on the program, and going through sections, and going, okay, you know, here's why some people would object to this, and some other people would object to that, but what do you have positive in its place, etc.,
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etc.? We can't just simply have a, I don't know, shrug your shoulders, because that's what we've had for a long, long time.
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We all need to have some position on these things, that's true. That's great, that's fine, love to do it, but it can't be done in this context, where people are memeing at each other, and I had a guy,
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I saw a tweet today, I've muted all the
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G3 guys, and I've blocked and muted James White, he's just not good for my faith right now, and I'm like, regarding what?
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I've hardly addressed this. I mean, I knew we were coming from that context, which
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I knew meant it was going to be dealt with seriously, and in a mature fashion, and without silly, childish memes, and so I've sort of been watching this stuff from the sidelines, pretty much, certainly thinking about it, certainly being concerned about it, but I can't even imagine, if you're willing to block and stop listening to people from whom you've learned so much of your theology, over something like this, then what you didn't learn was maturity, because if you're memeing about this stuff, if you're saying, well you know what, if people aren't going to agree with us, we're just going to childishness, absolute childishness, it's impatience, it is not spirit born, and it will result, like I said, in your having national conference in the back room of the
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Holiday Inn, because it will not, it will not be blessed by God, so can we have these conversations without the immaturity, can we have these conversations without silly memes, and stuff like that, can we pull that off, it needs to happen, it really does, there has to be, we need to have a consistent and large scale response to the moral chaos and the evil of Washington State and the city of Chicago and everything where we are perverting everything good that God has given us, there needs to be a consistent and clear and firm response to all that, no question about it, and it's not going to come from memes, it's not going to come from memes, so I'm pretty disappointed, to be honest with you, when
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I provided correction to the Wolfs, the response was not good,
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Williams said, well I meant it's not a thing today, well, okay, that's not what you said,
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A, B, that's not the context in which we were talking with Doug, B, and C, yes it is still a thing today because you have to be able to differentiate between sacralism and quote -unquote
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Christian nationalism, so all of that, the proper response from Williams would have been to have not made the comment in the first place, but then
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Stephen Wolf, I was just like, really? He just doubled down, he was just dancing around in his responses, well he's really upset about this,
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I'm sorry, but as I sit here right now, I had to ask someone, how old is this man?
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Because he's not acting mature in any way at all, this is not good, this is not a good look at all, so serious disappointment there on my part, but that doesn't change the fact that we need to be talking about what it means to live faithfully as God's judgment comes and build for the time when
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God tears down what needs to be torn down, shakes what needs to be shaken, so what cannot be shaken remains, and we've got to focus on what cannot be shaken, and what cannot be shaken is not going to be built up by dividing the body of Christ by immature people who will not be patient and lay the foundation that needs to be laid.
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And I'm saying this as a person who's pretty much in agreement with a lot of the foundational issues, and yet I recognize you cannot present this to people in this kind of snide, meme filled, social media type situation, you can't do it, you can't do it, it's disaster in the making, it's disaster in the making.
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So there you go, there's our driving line for today, I'll try to get this to Rich as soon as possible, and I appreciate your listening in, and like I said, be listening later today, don't want to be talking about this on the program today, got other important stuff to be talking about, but there you go, thanks for listening, we'll see you next time,