Talkin' Christmas & Comedy with Hans Fiene (of Lutheran Satire)

As you can tell by looking at me today, I'm absolutely in a mood for nothing but seriousness. No hijinks or shenanigans are going to play out at all in the next hour. So stay tuned. Your Calvinist podcast begins right now.

And.

Opening the Advent Episode and Introducing the Guest

Welcome back to your Calvinist podcast. My name is Keith Foskey and I am your Calvinist. This is our first episode in the Advent season, and we are super excited about our guest today. And I'm going to be bringing him in in just a moment.

It's a guy that most of you will already know, and I'm super excited to have a conversation with him. But before I bring him in, I want to do just a quick couple things to remind you about on the show, especially if you're new to the show.

This show is a ministry of Sovereign Grace Family Church. So if you're in the Jacksonville area, come and see us at Sovereign Grace, and you can find out more about us at sgfcjacks .org. We also have some partners with the show that I want to mention.

We're partnered with Tiny Bibles. Tiny Bibles is the smallest printed Bible on the market right now. It's available at tinybibles .com. They also have the Tiny Gospel of John and something new for Christmas.

This is the William Tyndale, it's the 1534 edition of his Bible, completely photo replicated, and it is available on their website. And if you go there and use my name, Keith, you'll get a discount on anything you purchase, as well as going to Striving for Eternity Ministries.

They have the What Do We Believe is a book. It's an introduction to systematic theology. It's great for those who are already learned and want to know more, but those who are just getting introduced to the subject, this would be great for anybody of any level.

And you can go there and check them out. And again, if you use Keith as a coupon code, you'll get a percentage off. And I want to remind you about private family banking. That is a group that invites you to join a growing number of like-minded individuals, families, and entrepreneurs working together to form a unique part of the parallel economy.

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You can learn more about them by going to banking at privatefamilybanking .com or get a copy of their free ebook. And that is in the description below. Last but not least, you'll notice that I'm drinking from my Squirrely Joe's cup.

Squirrely Joe has recently decided he wants to partner with me, but in a different way than some of my other partners. He's going to be partnering with me to sponsor my short videos that I do. And you guys see a lot of those that come up every week.

And you're going to see on those short videos a coupon code there. If you use my name, Keith, you get 20 off of anything in the show. And I just wanted to mention him today because he's a great guy and he sent me some great coffee.

So I'm enjoying that during the show. All right. Well, that was enough of that. Let's move on now to our guest. I'm thankful and excited to have him on the show. Hans Feeney of Lutheran Satire. Hans, thank you for coming in today.

It's a pleasure to be with you. It was a fantastic theme song that you had at the beginning of your show.

Yes, indeed it is. I love the fact that you say Pope of Lutheran, is it say Lutheran, Lutheranity, yeah, Lutheranity. I love it. You're the Pope of Lutheranity.

That's right.

Speaking of the theme song, almost every week when I play the theme song, someone will write in and say, is that Hans Feeney? Is that him singing? So your voice is obviously one that people recognize.

And I guess that's because you've sung songs on your channel. What's your favorite song that you've sung on your channel?

Well, that's a great question. I have one of my best friends, my buddy Justin, who I was in a band with in college. We did a lot of songwriting together. I wanted to be a very serious for real songwriter for a number of years.

And Justin pointed out to me a number of years ago that my gimmick songs were always my best ones, which is true, but makes me sad that I'm only really good at songwriting when I'm making fun of the idea of songwriting.

I like the We Are the Protestants song from the Reformation Piggybackers video. And I've done a few videos that weren't super substantive, but they were just kind of an excuse to do a theme song. So I had a series that I was doing a little while ago, a number of years ago, called Your Friends and Neighbors, which were just short little videos picking apart various concepts.

And I would do a theme song for each of those. And sometimes the theme song was longer than the actual video. And so I did one, I started doing them in styles of people because that was kind of fun for me to write stuff like that.

So there was one called, I think it was called Jerry the Contemporary Worship Pediatrician. I don't even remember what the joke was, but this theme song was done in the style of Paul Simon. And then I have a video called Bill the Unitarian Proctologist.

And the joke was that he just wanted to focus on the parts of the colon that were already healthy. And so everyone who went to him died. But the theme song was done in the style of Elvis Costello. And I'm really happy.

I was really pleased with how that turned out. But I think overall, musically, just like it was actually not really that much of a joke song, but the Diet of Worms song from the there was a sort of a rap battle between Martin Luther and Charles V.

Musically, I'm probably proudest of that. That, I think, is actually legitimately like a it's this video. The jokes come from kind of in the video jokes, but the song itself is actually pretty straightforward and serious.

So still laboring under the delusion that I can be a serious songwriter. That one's probably my favorite.

I love it. I love it. And I do want to. I want to take a step back for anybody who doesn't know you. And I imagine most of my audience probably does because we swim in the same boat as far as the audiences go.

We probably swim in the same streams. People who love comedy and Christian comedy. But how long ago did you put out your first Lutheran satire video? And what what a couple of questions and you can just answer them all together.

One, what made you think it was a good idea? What made you think comedy was the way to go? And how was it received immediately? Did you get pushback or did you immediately have people love it?

Yeah, so it was about 14 years ago, 13 and a half, 14 years ago, something like that. I was supposed to do 10 videos in honor of my 10th anniversary, and I got I have three of them done. So so maybe by my 20th anniversary, I'll have those I'll finish celebrating the 10th anniversary.

But I had written a couple of skits in years before. I've always kind of wanted to be a comedy writer and I never had anything to do with them. I would just write them for my own amusement and kind of show them to a couple of people.

And I never quite know what to do with them. And I had a friend who was a screenwriter or aspiring screenwriter who I sent some stuff to her and I said, how do I do something with this? And and she told me she said, well, there's this new software that had just come out back then.

This is around 2000, early 2011, 2010, something like that, called Extra Normal, which was the text to type stuff from my earliest videos, which is robo voices where you type in the dialogue and the characters would say it was no inflection at all.

It was just flatly delivered, you know, in the days before AI technology.

And is that the one with the dispensationalist with the mutant powers going?

Yes. Yeah. So that was back in that era. And I so I started putting those so I started putting those out. And initially, I wasn't really thinking of doing anything with it. I had to. Clearly, I didn't have any real plans for anything by virtue of the fact that my channel is called Lutheran Satire, because that's not a good name.

It's a very, very unoriginal, boring, straightforward name that would be like it's like if you wrote it's like if you made a movie and you go, this movie is called Hero Saves the Day, you know, like it's just a very straightforward description of what it is.

I don't know what I would have called it if I thought about it more, but it was originally just kind of inside Lutheran baseball stuff, jokes about stuff that confessional Lutherans would kind of argue about.

And and I was just sort of making fun of the kind of unhingedness of how passionate we'd get about sort of silly things. And then I started to branch out a little bit more. And I there was a video that I did.

The first video I did that I noticed was starting to get a notable amount of views, I think was a video I did about responding to biblicists. And that got around 5000 views. This was in the real early days when that was a lot.

And I started noticing some ELCA guys were sharing it. And I thought, oh, no, I don't I want people to know I'm not on the same team that that my objection to biblicists, to biblicism, is that you're being you're trying to be legalistic or trying to insist upon needing a Bible passage for something that's like a general Christian concept that you should be able to piece two and two together.

So my objection to biblicism was someone someone basically just like making the argument. You can't say insurance fraud is wrong because the word insurance fraud isn't anywhere in the Bible. Or even if someone were to say, where is the word Trinity in the Bible?

Right. That kind of thing. As and saying, well, this is a word that you're using to express a concept that's deeply biblical. But what I was not at all criticizing was believing that the word of God is authoritative, which I could I could tell was that's for the ELCA folks.

That's what biblicism means is just actually believing in the law. And so I didn't want to be lumped in with those guys. So I did a video on the differences between the ELCA and the LCMS. And then I started to realize, oh, there are actually people who don't know this stuff.

And people outside of my own circles are picking up on this. And I realized this could actually be a helpful venue for teaching people what it is that we believe. And by using humor, you're able to do it in a way humor allows you to really quickly unpack ideas that and to and to kind of hack at ideas that in normal discourse would take you a long time to sort of get near.

And so so I kind of found to discover that was that by doing everything with kind of a wink and a smile and by also being willing to gore your own ox, it enabled you to get much closer to false ideas that you wanted to show people why they were wrong and to do it in a way where people wouldn't be as defensive about it.

And also to just to throw out there to people, hey, there's this confession of faith that you may not have heard of. You may not have been aware that that exists and you'll find this. I knew this. I heard this a lot from.

So when I went to the seminary in Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana, I would say close to 40 percent, I think, of my classmates were adult converts to Lutheranism. And a lot of times you would hear the story from them was they'd grown up in churches and they could tell something was not quite right, but they couldn't put their finger on it and they'd read the Bible and they couldn't quite understand why their churches were teaching them things that really seemed to push back against what they were.

Hearing from the scriptures.

And then all of a sudden they discovered Lutheranism and they went, oh, gosh, the things that I thought were kind of true and I thought it was the only person that had sort of pieced this together. There's like a whole church body that believes this.

And so I began to realize that there's a bunch of those people out there and it would be good to just kind of put Lutheranism on the radar for them so they could say, oh, you know, this guy picked apart an idea that I had I'd never really evaluated why I believe that, you know.

So if I did a video on, say, one of my video that I might at some point redo just because I liked the idea of it and it was done back in the old robo voice day, which kind of limited the way I was able to when I was doing the robo voices, you could really only make one joke, which was you had to make you had to write in such a way that it was funnier with a deadpan delivery than it would be if you were recording your own dialogue, which is obviously what I transitioned to doing.

And I did a video called St. Paul's Baptism Oopsie, which was seeking to show how from a Lutheran perspective, our understanding of of every passage that describes what baptism is and what it does is describing it as God's work for us rather than our work for God.

And and showing how if you want to argue that baptism now saves you doesn't really mean baptism now saves you, that the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit doesn't actually mean that like you're you're putting yourself in a position where you have to repeatedly argue the Bible doesn't actually mean what it says about baptism a lot of times in a row when it's talking about it, which should start to kind of send off some triggers of maybe my position on baptism isn't actually right.

Just sort of saying it's an outward sign of an inward change. There's a lot of scripture that you have to kind of twist your way around to making that work. And so that was kind of the gist of the video.

So I wasn't I and I never have expected like I wouldn't expect a Baptist to watch that and go, oh, I was wrong the whole time. Now I'm a Lutheran. But my hope was, oh, they'll watch this. I've picked apart this something that they just never really thought about before, and I picked it apart in such a way where they go, well, I should probably look into that a little bit more, you know, and then for people who who may have been kind of laboring under some false doctrines that that were harming them.

And then they realize, oh, wait a minute, there's a way out of this that that this video is sort of indicating I should look into that. So the happiest I've ever been in terms of my work with Lutheran satire has been when I've had people email me, message me, whatever it might be, and say, hey, I saw a couple of your videos a number of years ago, and it made me really curious about Lutheranism.

So I started looking into I went to my local LCMS Lutheran church and talked to the pastor there. And then, you know, after a while, they ended up becoming Lutheran. So that's kind of my has been my goal with it.

And I think that using the avenue of humor helps that because because part of it is a two minute response. If I'm going to do a video trying to teach Lutheran doctrine, two minutes, three minutes, whatever it is, four minutes for video is not really enough time to sufficiently say anything.

But it's enough time to hack at an idea that people haven't picked apart yet and realize, oh, there's there's more to that. And so that's kind of my goal in what it is that I do. And I think humor has been a very, very helpful avenue for that.

By the way, I just I just noticed your ad at the bottom of the screen here, buy me a coffee dot com. And for a second, I thought that said buy meat coffee. And I was going to ask what is what in what in Calvin's institutes, what are the institutes of John Calvin?

It requires you what even is meat coffee, let alone what theological rationale do you have for imposing that upon yourself?

That's so funny. Buy me a coffee is is is just another version of Patreon. It's a way for people to support the show. I didn't want to do a Patreon and this was another another way of doing it.

It's like I'm going to register by meat coffee.

I think you should review what I think was you create meat coffee. If we created bacon flavored coffee, yeah, that would. That would rule. In fact, I'm going to call Squirrelly Joe as soon as we're done.

I'm going to say we got a million dollar idea.

Yeah, million dollar idea.

I feel like that's one of those ideas where you're going, I can make so much money off of this, but I really hope it doesn't actually work. It would it would make me it's not wrong, but I'd feel gross about becoming a.

Millionaire. That's right. I'm the meat coffee guy. So what do you do? I make me coffee. That's terrible.

Yeah, that sounds awful. But I know you're going to be very successful in that.

What's so funny is basically what you just said, going back to what you were talking about, you're basically a gateway drug to Lutheranism.

Yeah, that's how I would. I would hope that I and I'm sort of a gateway drug to.

Calvinism. So we're we are we are the cigarettes.

If you took if you took health class in in nineteen ninety six, I think we're about the same age, like like like we did. We are the cigarettes and beer of our respective theological traditions. You may think it's safe.

Yeah, just it's just you're just having fun. But next thing you know, you're on to the heroine of the Lutheran confessions. Oh, my God. Before you know it, you thought it was safe to be hanging out with your with cigarettes, Keith Foskey.

And then but then you're on to the crack cocaine of the Westminster Confession of Faith or whichever, whichever. What's what's which one do you subscribe to?

Well, we hold to the First London Confession, which is a Baptist confession. But it's so funny because so many people start reformed Baptist and then immediately become Presbyterian. So you're right. It would be it would just be another gateway because people people will start.

I have a friend who was who was in a reformed Baptist church and he was an elder and he switched to being a Presbyterian. And that was a huge leap. I mean, he went from, I mean, a leader in the church to having to step down and join a Presbyterian church.

And now he's studying for seminary in a Presbyterian church. That's a huge jump. I mean, but theologically, the real big jump is a is a view of baptism and, of course, a view of covenant theology. But but for us, it's like, man, he abandoned ship.

Yeah. So have you always I know I asked you this on our Lutheran video when I did it, but I don't quite remember your answer because we I had like six of you on. But have you always been Lutheran? You grew up Lutheran or did you become a Lutheran?

Yeah, no, I so I've come from a long line of Lutheran pastors. My dad's a Lutheran pastor. My his father was a mortician. His father was a farmer. But then back on up, it was about Lutheran pastors all the way back into the days of the Reformation.

And then on my mom's side as well, my mom's father was a pastor, seminary professor, seminary president. His father was a was a politician, was the governor of Minnesota. My he was my great-grandfather.

My great this is a thing. This is a free form podcast, so I feel free to go wherever I want. Please. My great-grandfather, Jacob L. Otteson Price, was the governor of Minnesota back in the 1920s. And he is historically notable because he's the first person to sign anti-lynching legislation.

There was a terrible lynching in Duluth, Minnesota. So he's the first governor to sign a bill against lynching, which on the one hand, I'm very proud of. And on the other hand, I'm very confused by. Because I always assumed that the law against murder just covered all of the ways that that you could murder someone.

And so I learned that and I was like, that's so cool. And then you go, wait, do does there need to be a law? Do you have does the government just have to think of every possible way to kill someone and they have to make a law about every specific?

Well, you know, like if you if you stab a guy to death with a frozen ear of corn and and you're just like, well, is there a frozen ear of corn law? And they're like, shoot. No. So he just he just gets away with it.

I don't know the answer to that.

Stand-Up Comedy, Family Background, and Childhood Movies

I want to jump to a quick question. And this was. I was going to bring this in later, but I'm going to do it now. You also do stand up, which is something that I think is awesome.

I have done stand up. I've done it a couple of times. Haven't done it in about a year.

Well, I love that because it's a dream of mine to do it. And I've done it a few times. And and I know you do have done it. And so would that what you just said about your grandfather, would that be an example?

That'd be a bit. That would be.

Oh, yeah. I think I think that could be a bit. Yeah. There's a good chunk of thing there. Yeah. Just like working your way into like the again, the concept of the the rule is you have to make a law against every specific way that you could murder someone and and how.

If you're just incredibly creative, you're allowed to you're allowed to kill people. You just can't get away with it every time. There's definitely a bit there.

So how do when you did stand up, was your stand up more from stories of your own life or did you actually write jokes? How did you what was your.

Yeah, I don't really do like jokes, jokes. I so I did it a couple of times. It got really just I just got really busy and had some had some other things going on that didn't make the timing of it work out at some point.

I'll go back out there. But yeah, no, I would do routine, the bits, you know, so I like funny ideas that you can just kind of pick apart. And so the first time I did it, I mean, I wrote out the whole routine and memorized it basically.

It was a bit about and part of this is true. How when I was in middle school, in social studies, they would do this thing when I was in middle school where they I so again, I'm almost 44. I was I went to school at an interesting time.

So the 90s was like it was not things hadn't gone fully woke, but they were kind of working their way that way. So they were working their way towards it in the sense of like you would learn that they would try to teach you.

Everyone has contributed. Every culture has contributed something to the treasury of knowledge that we all have. So the idea was, you know, like, oh, it's not all Europeans and do everything. We have other cultures that have done really great things, too.

And so they would teach us. They taught us that the Aztecs invented the number zero. And I'm sure there's some degree of truth to that, but they presented it as though no one else had a number to represent the idea of nothing, which obviously was not the case.

And so I did a routine in the Latin to have me.

Hello. And that didn't.

Yeah, right. So so I so it was a stand up bit about like, you know, you're the teacher getting increasingly and this part was made up, but it was part of the it was part of the bit was the teacher getting increasingly frustrated because we didn't believe that only the Aztecs had zero and the teacher getting mad at us for being racist, for not letting the Aztecs have zero.

So, you know, the idea was was like so part of the jokes were, you know, that you go wait, that they nobody else had zero. And she goes, no, only Aztecs had that. And you go, wait, did people have 10?

And they go, yeah, she goes, yeah, people had 10. And you go, wait, they had one zero, but they couldn't figure out zero. That doesn't make any sense. I said, that's like I'd be like if you went to the doctor and you go, can you look at this mole?

And the doctor goes, oh, no, you've got to get rid of that. That's precancerous. And you go, oh, no, does that mean it's going to turn into cancer? And the doctor goes, what's cancer? Right. So so like it's and then so then and it was a thing about how like how would this really work out if you didn't have a number for zero?

So, you know, you're in ancient Greece and you're walking down the road and some guy named Demetrius jumps out and he's like, give me all your drachmas. And you go, I don't sorry, buddy, like I'm broke.

And he goes, well, how many drachmas do you have? And you go, oh, I got one. And he goes, OK, well, give me that. And you go, no, I don't I don't have the kind of one where I have one I have. I have the kind of one where I don't have that.

So so there was so that kind of stuff is interesting to me, whether you can just sort of pick apart. There's one bit I'm planning on doing at some point. I learned this a while ago. I think about this all the time.

So about a year, half a year ago or so, I was in the car with my son taking him to school and we saw this gal who was riding a bike and we could only see her from behind. And I couldn't tell if I couldn't tell if she was a little person or just like a big kid.

And but she looked kind of tall to be to have dwarfism. Right. So no judgment at all. I was just curious. And so then I started to wonder and I asked my son, I said, I thought I said, is dwarfism like is that just a genetic thing?

Is it a genetic marker or is it just if you're under a certain height? And I didn't know. And so what I meant to what I was trying to figure out was how tall can you be and still be considered a dwarf?

But what I what I asked my phone was, who is the tallest dwarf? And my phone told me I was not expecting this answer. The tallest dwarf in history was seven feet, nine inches tall because there is a Swiss man named Adam Rainer.

He was born in the early in 1899 and he had dwarfism. So when he was 18 years old, he was four feet tall. And then he developed shortly thereafter, developed a tumor on his pituitary gland, which is what causes gigantism.

So he had the same condition as under the giant. And by the time he died in his 30, in his late 30s, in his 40s, he was seven feet, nine inches tall. And so I was just fascinated by the concept of being a little person and then becoming a giant.

And at what point, like in what ways do you stay a little person and in what ways? Like, so did he keep going to the little person support group meetings? When he was seven feet tall and he like he gets kicked out of them because, you.

Know, everyone's everybody else thinks he's like, they're trying to put us in the.

Circus. And he's like, yeah, I know exactly how that feels. And like, no, they're putting us in the circus to fire us out of cannons. Not that's not why that's not why you're in the circus, you know, or like, you know, did he have a did he have a grandmother who just kept praying for him to grow?

And he just you know, so he's like so he's praying like, Lord, please let me grow. And he does. And all of a sudden he's five nine. He's like, well, this is amazing. All right, I'm going to aim for six foot.

And so he keeps praying. And all of a sudden he hits six foot and six to six, five. And then he's six eight. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Who's still praying? And then, you know, and his grandmother's still praying.

It's because you know how grandmothers it takes them five years to download new information about you. So like he shows up at his grandmother's house, you know, with his eye peering in the window like the like the giant and she's at the side of her bed just and please let my grandson Adam grow.

I know that's very important.

He's going, Grandma, no, that's enough. Please stop praying for that. So anything where you can just sort of see layers of jokes and anything that sort of what how did this work out is funny to me. So that's the kind of stuff I've done when I've done stand up.

I love that. I I didn't realize we're almost the same age. And by the way, I haven't mentioned it yet, but I've been wearing this hat this whole time just as a goof. I'm going to take it off. And yes, I do keep a brush right next to me in my office so I can fix my hair anyway.

It's very nice now.

Yes. Well, thank you. I feel much more professional. Yeah. But the and I'm wearing my Christmas tie, too. So very nice. But no, when we grew up in the same time, so we probably grew up with the same movies.

I don't know if your family, you know, being that you grew up, I grew up in a Christian home, but movies are sort of allowed. You know, some people don't allow movies.

Yeah. Yeah. We weren't like we weren't allowed to watch stuff that had sexual content in it. And violence was not like what my parents didn't like horror movies. My mom came home from I was at the at my house watching the Texas Chainsaw Massacre with my friend Jason when I was and we were too young to have rented it for kids who don't understand.

I guess everything no one will understand this. I don't know how things work now. I guess you watch movies on Netflix and there's no like guardrails for anything that we used to sort of have guardrails back in the day was you weren't allowed to like rent, you know, R-rated movies to kids who are under a certain age.

You weren't allowed to. But it happened all of the time at Rainbow Video in Zionsville, Indiana. And so we had rented the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And there's a scene where Leatherface like hangs a girl on a meat hook.

And the violence is totally implied. It doesn't actually show anything. But my parents came home at that moment and walked in the room at that exact moment. And my mom still to this day will talk about how that was the most graphic thing she's ever seen.

And I pointed out to her, they don't actually there's no blood and there's no actual like hook going into flesh. But she doesn't believe me, even though I'm objectively correct about that. But so we weren't stuff like that was was we weren't allowed to, even though it was the 90s, like your parents aren't around, you know.

So, yeah, so there were some rules, but I saw just kind of everything, you know, the typical stuff that everyone saw.

I do a bit about how how 80s movies lied to us about karate because I do karate. I've been in karate for 30 years and how Danielson, if you watch the first karate kid, it begins on the first day of school.

He gets beat up on before the first day of school and the tournament is on December 9th. So he goes from the first day of school to December, no, maybe December 19th. But it's it's that's right.

Yes. The day before my birthday. I remember that from the movie.

Yeah. And he doesn't actually start training until the day after Halloween because he gets beat up on Halloween night. So he gets he goes from no karate to the undisputed champion of the All Valley Under 18 karate championship in six weeks of training without ever sparring or knowing the.

Rules. Yeah, but but he did trim a bonsai tree. So he trimmed a bonsai tree.

That's right. That's right.

He waxed. He did the wax on wax off with the car and he watched Mr. Miyagi do the crane thing. That's right. So that's better than learning how to do karate.

Do you know? Do you know Gary Goldman? The comedian is? I don't think so. No, he's a he's a Jewish comedian. Very funny guy. And he he talks about karate kid. He said he said, Mr. Miyagi says, if you do crane kick right, no can defend.

He said, when I was in school, I tried it. Trust me, can defend.

Yeah, it's not an efficient way. Especially because now that may have been true before everyone knew what the crane kick was. Yeah, exactly. What would actually work now is if you did it and then just went like this with the leg that's already out and then and then delicately kicks the guy.

But that doesn't seem like it would be a real forceful kick or dive in, like lift your hands and then fall on the guy or something.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. But we all knew it was we all know it's coming. But we all love that movie as a kid. I showed that movie to my kids and they were bored out of their minds until the fight. Yeah, they're complaining the whole time.

And then they get to the fight scene and they go, that was the awesomest movie I've ever seen. That's like, all right, I'm glad, glad it redeemed it. But it's weird because I don't remember. I mean, I was fascinated by that movie the whole way along.