Apologia Radio Special: Steven Bancarz in Studio

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November 21, 2019

Watch the new episode of Apologia Radio with Steven Bancarz! He joins us live in the studio. We talk with Steven about Yoga, Martial Arts, the New Age, and more! Tell someone!

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00:47: All right, guys, welcome back to Apologia Radio, apologiastudios .com is where you guys go to get more of the
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01:01: Don't forget to go to reasonsforjesus .com, reasonsforjesus .com, to get more from Stephen Bankars.
01:08: A couple of things during the break, I think there's good questions to answer, so thank you guys for putting them in. Let's see here, somebody asked the question,
01:15: I had brought up the issue of martial arts, and my training in martial arts, and this is the question, how is doing martial arts for combat different than doing yoga for stretching?
01:25: It's a very important question, it's actually a good question, and I think I should address it, because it's actually really important to understand distinctions.
01:32: There are martial arts systems that you absolutely should not engage in, you just can't.
01:38: They were started on the basis of an antithetical worldview to the biblical worldview, they were started with, they were rooted in paganism, mysticism, they were rooted in an unbelieving or pagan view of the universe, and so you do have systems,
01:55: I'll just throw one that should be easy for everyone to sort of grab hold of, Tai Chi, is something that's just, it's root, the very bottom of the system, everything about it is from a particular foundational worldview.
02:07: So the movements themselves, what you're trying to harness, all of that, is the
02:12: Chi, I mean the Chi, the internal power, working through the system, all that stuff you're trying to send out into the world, everything is rooted in that worldview, and it cannot be detached.
02:23: You can't do Tai Chi in a meaningful way, but I think Tai Chi stinks anyways in martial arts, by the way, but it's not an effective martial art, it's truly just paganism, looking like a martial art system, but it's in an effective martial art system to begin with.
02:38: So if somebody says, well, I want to detach the spiritual aspects of Tai Chi just to do the movements in the martial art system of Tai Chi, I'd say, well, it's not an effective fighting system, period, and the movements are not really that helpful, you're not getting, like what
02:52: Stephen's talking about in terms of you can find better stretching elsewhere, more helpful things.
02:57: So yes, there are martial art systems that I would say you must stay away from, and Christians should not practice,
03:03: Tai Chi is one of them. But there are martial art systems that are just simply combat arts.
03:10: So martial means combat, combat arts that were just created for the battlefield.
03:16: They were created for combat, for self -defense, and if somebody says, well, I don't really know how there's a distinction,
03:21: I would say, well, is the psalmist doing okay when he says blessed is the
03:27: Lord my rock who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle? What's the training, the hands for war and the fingers for battle, what is that?
03:34: Martial science, martial combat, martial arts, martial arts. So you have examples of even praise to God for training in combat, combat itself, in a fallen world, yes, combat can be actually a righteous and godly thing.
03:50: Learning how the human body works, how to essentially manipulate the human body, how to take it apart in a way that protects others is a righteous thing in a fallen world.
04:00: In a world that's not fallen, do you need combat systems? No, but in a world that is fallen, are there righteous forms of combat?
04:07: Yes. So there are systems of combat, and you really need, if you're, by the way, if you were going to a martial arts school with your son or your daughter, and you are going to say start a good karate program or whatever,
04:19: Thai boxing or whatever, you really do need to ask questions of the instructor. You need to ask them, like, are you into the spiritual aspect of martial arts?
04:27: Because we are very opposed to that. We will not engage in any of that, and we want to let you know that up front.
04:33: Ask those questions, because I would say the numbers of people who are really involved in the spiritual aspect, from what
04:40: I know being in the industry for so long, is actually really low. Most people are just doing it for the combat aspect of it.
04:47: They have no idea of even the history of the martial arts system itself, much less understand the spiritual nature of it.
04:52: But you should ask those questions, because you will run into the guys who are just dead set, just very dedicated to the spiritual aspect.
05:01: I remember that I was teaching for a guy. His school was crashing and burning locally, and he's probably about a month away from closing.
05:10: And so I used to help guys kind of get their schools back on track when I was, you know, young, 19, 20 years old. And I remember
05:16: I went in to teach for this guy and to help him get his school back on track. And this guy did combat
05:21: Taekwondo, which is what I did, and he did some other system. But he also did Tai Chi, and he had this
05:27: Tai Chi master from China that he would come out and he, like, worshipped this guy. Just an adoration, and it was all about his work.
05:34: Yeah. Well, what was interesting is that he would just, you'd be in the middle of a, this is kind of funny, you'd be in the middle of a conversation with him, just talking about normal things like, hey, what'd you have for lunch today?
05:44: He's like, yeah, you know, I had a, I went over to Taco Bell and I had, and he would just, in the middle of conversation, he would just all of a sudden stop.
05:54: And he would just, and start like, you know, moving, and his eyes would kind of roll back in his head.
06:01: And he would just sort of just like, in the middle of a random conversation, it was kind of embarrassing. He'd bring people, like, to talk to him.
06:07: He'd be like, oh, that's nice. That's nice. And he'd just start randomly, like, you know, posing. How is that not the same as the
06:13: Pharisees enlarging their garments and praying in the streets? Yeah, yeah. It's just this boasting of a spiritual, very much so.
06:20: And so, but situations like that, there was a guy, he knew what Tai Chi was. He knew the system, he understood the worldview, and he was implementing it every day of every part of his life.
06:28: It doesn't, the Tai Chi wasn't something he just did on the mat. It was something that was going with him to Taco Bell, right?
06:35: So there has to be categories here and distinctions in terms of like thinking about the category of martial arts.
06:45: That's a combat system. You better be thankful for combat systems, because we need law enforcement officers to use combat systems on the guy who kidnapped and raped the eight -year -old girl, and they caught him in the room.
06:58: Do you want them to go in there willy -nilly, or do you want them to be trained in combat and pain compliance systems, arm bars, choke holds, those sorts of things, guards, to be able to take down an evil man like that to bring him to justice?
07:11: No, you need combat systems. So when you hear the word martial arts, you can't just say, oh,
07:18: Tai Chi is a martial art, so therefore all martial arts are about that. Completely different categories, but yoga, but yoga, not the same.
07:28: Yoga wasn't started, and no system of yoga is started merely on the basis of the stretches.
07:34: It doesn't have that origin story, and it works through that line the whole way through.
07:42: It always moves back to that foundation, whereas if you're talking about a combat system of karate, it has no attachment to this over here, this worldview of Tai Chi and that whole system.
07:52: You're talking about, even like, it's kind of funny, a lot of this is, it's almost like, maybe we should try to change things a bit.
07:59: There are some traditional systems of karate that still, it's kind of funny. I went to the
08:05: Junior Olympics, and I went for a traditional karate, like the old school real karate systems, and you see people like the
08:14: Junior Olympics karate systems, and they're using weapons, but they're using their farming tools.
08:23: That's what the Japanese were doing, like when they created their sense of martial arts, they were farmers defending themselves, so they're using like hoes and pickaxes and like whatever the case, you have people in the 20th century, like white
08:35: Americans, with like these Japanese gardening tools, they're like, yo! That's just because that's where it comes from.
08:43: It wasn't from like a worship service, so that's why they're still using, like even the size, like the size with -
08:50: With five tambourine cages? No, the Raphael, Raphael from Ninja Turtles, he used the size.
08:56: You know, so we have to be able to think as Christians in terms of categories, and I'll just say one last thing.
09:04: Somebody said, Calvinism is false teaching also, beware of their beliefs, they don't evangelize because they believe that if you're not one of the elect, you're going to hell.
09:13: Is that what the Apologia Studios feed looks like, like a church that doesn't evangelize?
09:19: See a lot of that happening with us, or I don't think so, so - One thing in defense of that too is that everyone believes if you're not elect, you're going to hell.
09:28: It's just a matter of defining, to be the elect, does that mean being a part of a corporate body, does it mean to be unconditionally or conditionally elect, but everyone believes if you're not the elect, you're going to hell.
09:38: That's right. There you go. Thank you, Stephen. There you go, thank you, Stephen. Somebody mentioned Irish stick fighting, which
09:43: I laughed about. Irish stick fighting? Which I'm pretty sure there's nothing spiritual about that, that's just sin, it's just sin,
09:51: I'm just going to maul your face with a stick. Probably just people mauling people. Yeah. Yeah, very much so. Actually, our friend
09:58: Douglas Wilson recently did something on combat sports and women in combat sports. I'm thinking of actually doing a video in response to Doug, even though we love
10:05: Doug, he's our buddy, just disagree with him on some points there, I think it'd be helpful to talk about because MMA is all the rage and all the rest, but yeah,
10:15: I didn't tell you that. I didn't see that. I was thinking about doing that because we love Doug, but we're going to disagree on some points. We're not going to ban you if you mention his name.
10:22: No, no. He can be named here for sure. Oh, yeah. We were going to ask the same question.
10:28: Am I saying, by the way, this is how little I know about it is I don't even know if I'm saying it.
10:33: That's what it's called. I actually know just as little as you do. Okay. So this is one thing I put off to the side because it stirred up a lot of controversy in the body of Christ, and I know if I take a peek at it, it'll end up being a full -blown research project, and I'm working on a different research project right now, so that's not something
10:52: I can tackle at this moment in time. I've seen some quotes from the originator of the
10:59: Enneagram that are really disheartening and that do seem to have very clear worldview problems that lean toward pantheistic theology identification of the self with God, affirming the self as being divine, but I don't know how much of that theology of his plays into the actual
11:16: Enneagram itself. I don't know how much of that philosophy that he carries is actually pertinent to the
11:22: Enneagram, which I believe is a personality test. So it could be very well demonic, and I'm just unaware of it because I haven't looked into it enough.
11:31: Yeah. I've also seen, on the other side of the spectrum, there are Christians who are opposed to personality tests in general, altogether, or anything psychological in nature altogether.
11:41: That means you're operating out of the wisdom of the world or something, because you study human behavior or want to apply the studies of human behavior to yourself to have a better understanding of why you tick the way you do, or why your anxiety functions as it functions, or functions as it functions, and it's like,
11:59: I don't like that kind of dogmatic rejection of basic human research into the human brain.
12:08: So the Enneagram doesn't seem to be that. It seems to be something more spiritual in nature. It seems to be tied to astrology, from what
12:14: I understand. That's about the extent of what I know. We'll have to get into it. I just didn't know if you'd seen, because that's floating in your wheelhouse in terms of people bringing that up, saying what connection is there, all that stuff.
12:27: No, I actually would lean more toward the idea that psychology is something important that we can incorporate, not to necessarily solve problems in our life, but to help us understand why they're there.
12:41: If there's problems with how we're functioning mentally or emotionally, why is this happening?
12:48: How does the fight or flight response work in me? How does the brain store trauma? How do
12:53: I deal with shame or guilt if I've adopted some really core beliefs about myself that have been driving and motivating my behavior that come from some past trauma
13:04: I experienced as a kid or as a teenager or something like that? Have you read anything on euthetic counseling? On what counseling?
13:10: Newthetic. Newthetic. No, I haven't heard of Newthetic. Do we have some books here we can give them before we go? I believe so. You'll really enjoy this.
13:16: Remind me. I'll check. It's essentially an attempt to provide biblical foundation and grounding to all of these problems.
13:25: My seizure had made me lose some memory issues. They're still coming back.
13:31: Who's the author? J. Adams. J. Adams. There you go. J. Adams. His book, Competent to Counsel, is a good place to start.
13:38: He gives you a story of where he began in terms of study, psychological, all those different things going into some of the worst places to try to help and to do it from a biblical perspective.
13:49: It's actually pretty compelling stuff. Newthetic counseling just essentially means biblical counseling, but it's operating in all of these areas.
13:55: That's great. How do you properly apply? That's right. Absolutely. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. And a lot of Christians are opposed to that in general because they're scared of anything that they can't find in Scripture, but you kind of can find these principles in Scripture.
14:10: They're there for sure. An example would be whoever commits adultery destroys his own soul.
14:18: What actually happens if I'm being promiscuous sexually? How does that compile and affect me over time physiologically and psychologically?
14:27: All the consequences of the sin. Yeah. Right. Like the Bible says, confess your sins to one another that you may be healed.
14:34: There's something that happens in confession. There's a release that happens. Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.
14:42: The Bible tells us that these things are really important for us. It doesn't necessarily outline what the mechanics of this stuff is, how it plays out psychologically, but I believe one of the reasons, one of the many reasons
14:55: God puts commandments in place is for the purpose of protecting us against the consequences of what the sin would have on our mind, on our emotions.
15:05: It's extremely destructive. And if I need help sifting through that, going to, like you said, a biblically based counselor or reading biblically based counseling material to help me understand just why and how it's impacted me so that I can bring awareness and understanding and break through to the other side.
15:22: That's right. I mean, that's something that I think Christians should be taking advantage of as something God has blessed people with.
15:27: Luke and I would totally agree. From the very beginning, we've tried to... Our context of planning an apology at church was in a very tough context.
15:35: A lot of people were really broken, really hurt. And at the hospital I was a chaplain at, it was all sort of a funnel.
15:41: I was a chaplain at the hospital. People were coming to Christ. I was ministering from there. When they exited, they were coming to Apologia, and they were part of our church.
15:47: So it was just this flow of like awful counseling experience, right? Every day the worst of the worst stories, and then it would flow to us, and as soon as they were out there being discipled and counseled.
15:57: And we do, as Christians, have to have a biblically grounded response to the issues of trauma and those sorts of things.
16:05: So for example, like this video that I shared yesterday, which was just horrific, goodness gracious. A man kidnaps an eight -year -old girl.
16:14: I was actually thinking about this last night, quite a bit, what you and I are talking about right now. I didn't even know this was going to come up. This man is in the street.
16:22: She's walking her daughter down her own neighborhood street for a 6 .30 at night stroll. The light's still out, and this guy pulls up, kidnaps this eight -year -old girl right out of her mom's arms, just drives off.
16:36: Thank God there was a neighbor who had like a Nestor ring cam. Oh, is that how they got him? That's how they saw his car.
16:41: But he had her for eight hours, and the video footage, the chest cam stuff, body cam stuff came out of when they actually went and caught the guy.
16:50: They pull him out of the hotel room. He's naked and a big, big dude, and they go into the room looking for the girl.
16:56: There's blood on the bed. It was just a horrible, horrible thing to think about. But I was thinking about this in terms of Christians have to be able to work in this area biblically, because you have a little eight -year -old girl like that.
17:08: She's going to deal with trauma from being snatched out of her mom's arms. It's going to take a lot to deal with those images and that memory, and you've got to be able to do it biblically, not secularly and humanistically.
17:22: It has to be a biblical approach, or she's never going to heal. She's got to be able to contextualize that experience in the framework of God's world and God's power and providence and his character and his ability to have victory over the evil in this world.
17:37: You can't... Listen, a humanist, I say, has no ability to really help someone like that, because all you're going to do is just sort of just put
17:44: Band -Aids over trauma and never provide a ground from which fruit can start to grow and life can come out of it again.
17:52: You know, this little girl, she spent eight hours with this devil, this monster, and none of us could possibly understand what she went through.
18:02: Eight hours with this evil, evil monster, and that's going to be some serious trauma she's going to have to manage, and Christians have got to become conversant in this area to be able to not...
18:15: Because here's what tends to happen, is people will see from a church perspective, a Christian perspective, well, we've got to really be able to address these issues of trauma.
18:23: Like how do you talk to the girl that was passed around from foster home to foster home and raped numerous times in each home?
18:30: Like I had that in front of me more than once. How do you actually deal with the girl who was raped for eight years by her grandfather?
18:39: You know, that's some serious trauma. Like how do you deal with the guy who watched the Mexican mafia throw his best friend into a wood chipper?
18:47: You know, that was right in front of me. He was like, yeah, I'm struggling with the visuals. I'm having nightmares of what
18:53: I watched them do to my best friend. So people tend to say, look, this is real trauma, and if we're not addressing it as a church, people go, let's just go to the psychology, the psychiatric perspective that's secularist and humanist, and let's go from that perspective, and then you're just totally abandoning
19:10: Christ, biblical worldview stuff, and you're just dealing with band -aids. Or people go the other direction, like all that's who we, all that's, you know, who cares, unnecessary to really to create a field that's meaningful and biblical.
19:23: Let's just say it's the Bible. Like, it's like, wait, you gotta get, the Bible provides a grounding, and I'll just, this is the last word
19:30: I'll say here, I know I've been saying a lot. The Bible provides a grounding that gave us science, right?
19:36: It didn't tell us EMC squared. It didn't tell us all the details of our own galaxy and the rotation of the planets and all the rest.
19:47: It doesn't do that, but it provided the ground from which science was possible, because you have the principle of induction, you have an ordered universe that can be dependent upon, you have logical consistencies, laws of logic, immaterial, invariant, all those things, human dignity and value, all that stuff mattered.
20:05: So science comes out of there, modern medicine comes out of the biblical worldview. Just give you one last word on this kind of cool story is that if you ever go to get surgery, if you ever go to get, this is one of my favorite stories.
20:17: If you ever go to get surgery today and they put you to sleep for your surgery, and Marcus is probably really happy for this one.
20:23: He's having a heart surgery in a little bit. You can praise God for the biblical worldview.
20:29: Thank God for the book of Genesis when you're put to sleep in surgery today. The reason you're put to sleep in surgery today is because the father of anesthesiology who put people to sleep was reading in his
20:40: Bible the account of Genesis for his devotion, his daily devotional, and he comes to the part where it says that God puts
20:48: Adam to sleep to pull his rib to create woman, and he thought to himself, now if God does a major surgery on a human being and he puts him to sleep to do the surgery, to do this painful thing, he says, why aren't we doing that?
21:05: And so he tried to create a way to put human beings to sleep to do surgeries. So again, you can thank the biblical worldview for providing the grounding of all this different thought and perspective, and the same thing goes in this area of trauma and counseling.
21:19: It provides the worldview, the framework through which you can do all these things.
21:25: The other thing that's helpful is a strong view in God's sovereignty. That's right.
21:31: That's true. That is true. And remembering too that when God, when we were purchased with the blood of Christ, he purchased all of us, right, and he wants to redeem all of us, including our gifts, our passions.
21:44: There's some people who have been blessed with the gift of understanding human behavior and the passion for studying human behavior, and if God has redeemed this individual, does
21:54: God expect them to placate and shelf all of their skill set for the rest of his life and just work at McDonald's the rest of his life?
22:04: Or does God want to redeem his skill set and his passion that he put in him and use it for his purposes and the good of his church?
22:12: And if it could be biblically grounded, which it can, then that's something I think we should be more resourceful in, not afraid of.
22:18: So a good conversation to have too, because in terms of when people hear, and we obviously need to get into the
22:24: Enneagram and all that stuff and try to figure out background before we talk about it publicly in terms of dissecting it.
22:30: But hopefully what people will hear here is not the typical sort of fundamentalist separated view of like, well, all these things are just evil, so separate, get away, and, you know, no, we're not saying that.
22:42: We're saying that we have to make sure that we're thinking critically as Christians and with proper categories.
22:48: If something is fundamentally flawed and occultic at its base, at its root, then we need to burn that house down, not try to sort of like put
22:58: Jesus into its steps. Like you can't take a yoga, an ancient pagan ritual, and all of a sudden just rename the poses something about Jesus, like Sarah's pose, or something like that, or Ezekiel in the doo -doo, like you're laying down or something.
23:18: It's just, you can't Moses pose. It took me a second to get that one. Moses poses.
23:25: So yeah, there's an importance in categories. All right, guys. So I think time's up, right?
23:31: All right. Yeah, pretty much. So Stephen Bankars, thanks for joining us, brother. Thanks for having me. You are going to be on with Jeremiah Roberts and Andrew to do
23:38: Cultish. Can't wait. Can't wait for you to do that as well. And hopefully we get to do some this week too before we go. Absolutely. All right, guys.
23:44: Stephen Bankars, reasonsforjesus .com. Don't forget to go to apologiastudios .com. Get more content there, guys.
23:49: That's Luke the Bear. Also wanted to mention our Thanksgiving sales on the store at shop .apologiastudios
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24:02: We got a bunch of shirts, hats, stickers, all kinds of goodies. So yeah, check that out. 20 % off through the end of November.
24:10: All right, guys. Thank you guys for watching us. This is The Gospel Heard Around the World, Apologia Radio. Thank you guys. Catch you guys next week.