July 11, 2023 Show with Luke Saint on “The Sound Doctrine of Theocracy”

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 11th day of July, 2023.

And I'm thrilled to have a first-time guest today who is the son, or one of the sons, of one of my favorite guests who you've all heard interviewed on the program before, and I'm speaking of Joel Saint.

I have his son, one of his sons, Luke Saint, on the program today. He is an author, and he's the chairman of Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society, and today we are going to be addressing Luke's book, The Sound Doctrine of Theocracy, or Statism and the Christian Mind.

We're also going to be talking about an upcoming three-day event in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, featuring Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. But it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time ever to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Luke Saint.

Thanks for having me on, Chris. I appreciate it.

And it's Lancaster, right?

Lancaster, yeah. The emphasis is on the stir, Lancaster.

Lancaster. I am, as everyone who lives in Pennsylvania now realizes, not a native of Pennsylvania. I am a native of New York who just happens to be living in Pennsylvania ever since 2014 after relocating here.

So I still have the New York accent for everything, and that even includes my hometown of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which the locals call Carlisle. So I don't know if I'll ever want to pronounce it that way, but Luke, first of all, tell us about Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society.

The Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society was started probably a little over a decade ago with some guys who wanted to—I think it was started as a Bible study, and these guys wanted to basically talk about what they felt the church was not addressing.

They wanted to address things that they felt the church was ignoring, and they were frustrated that the Bible talks about all areas of life and that the church was not talking about all areas of life.

The church was putting much of the lamp underneath the bushel, and so they got together in Bible studies, and they were talking about—the biggest one, the big heavy hitter was politics. And so these guys would get together and talk about what does the Bible have to say about politics, what does the Bible have to say about money, what does the Bible have to say about taxation.

And they realized out of this that they wanted to start an organization that would come along side and help churches and pastors in addressing these things. And that's how the Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society was started.

We found out very quickly—I think I joined back in 2016, I think is when I joined, and we found out very quickly that the churches and the pastors did not want to be helped. They knew about where the church was being silent, and most of them, not all of them, most of them wanted it that way.

They didn't really want any sort of attention given to the areas that the Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society was frustrated with that they were ignoring. So we decided to basically—instead of cursing the darkness, we decided to light a candle.

We became an organization that does conferences, and we even did some parachurch ministries.

And Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society is theologically reformed and confessional and theonomic and postmillennial, right?

Yes, absolutely, we are. Yes. I mean, not all of us. I mean, we don't all—I mean, we're all—I believe we're all postmillennial. I believe we're all theonomic, all the board members anyway. But other than that, I don't think—you know, we've got some Baptists, we've got some Reformed Baptists, we're all Reformed, but we've got some Presbyterians in there.

So I'm not sure if we'd all fit that category, those categories, but, you know, we're ballparking it at least.

With the frequency of postmillennial and theonomic guests on Iron Trip and Zion Radio, people have been wondering in my audience if I have also jumped the amillennial ship and become postmillennial and theonomic.

I have not yet done that, in spite of the frequency of my guests being of that persuasion. But it just so happens that I have always, ever since I became a born-again believer, had close friendships with postmillennialists and theonomists.

And in fact, the late R .J. Rushdooney was a client of mine on WMCA Radio, an affiliate of Salem Media. I had created a program called The Voice of Sovereign Grace, which was aired nightly, Monday through Friday.

And every night there was a different individual whose sermon was aired, and all of the hosts, obviously, were Reformed. Obviously, that's a no-brainer, judging by the title of the show, The Voice of Sovereign Grace.

But the Calcedon Foundation sponsored one night a week, and it was not a sermon. It was an interview conducted with R .J. Rushdooney, and the individual performing that interview was Steve Schlissel of Messiah's Congregation in Brooklyn, New York.

And so I had gotten to know Brother Rushdooney a little bit and had him as a client, and have always benefited from the magazine, The Calcedon Report, and yet still have not yet jumped ship and become a theonomist.

But I hold it as an orthodox option and the eschatology associated with it, whereas there are, unfortunately, people who agree with you and I, Luke, on every area of theology. But when it comes to that issue, for some reason there are Reformed brethren who really go ballistic when it comes to hearing about somebody becoming a post-millennialist or a theonomist, and I have never understood that.

But I think a lot of it is because—.

I think a lot of that has—.

Go ahead.

I was going to say, I think a lot of that has to do with the world's goddess on the ropes, that if you subscribe to a certain—especially theonomy, if you subscribe to theonomy, then you want to chop off people's hands and put women in burkas and stuff like that.

And they have people thinking that way, that as soon as you say that word, that that's what you want. And so the Christian community doesn't want to, by and large, countenance the law of God as an option.

We're just like, if you even countenance the law of God as an option, that means I'm toying with the idea of putting women in burkas and chopping people's hands off. And we often associate those kinds of things with Muslim law, and we say, well, that's a theocracy, which is not a biblical theocracy anyway.

And we just don't even want to go there. We don't even want to countenance it because we're too afraid to even ask the question, does the Bible even address justice? And we've bought this idea that, in the back of our minds, I know it's there because I've had conversations with people, and push comes to shove, and you get them on the ropes, and you say, hey, listen, is the law of God just or is it unjust?

And when push comes to shove, the answer is it's unjust. It's unjust. That's in the back of their minds saying the law of God is just unjust. That's what it is. God gave us bad ideas. His ideas were dumb, and it was good for them.

I don't even think it was to say it was good for them. They'd say it was bad for them. They'd say, I'd hate to be an Israelite back in Old Testament Israel and all that kind of thing. So I think as soon as you say post-millennial or theonomic, I think people have this pre-wired idea of what it is to be a theonomist because the secular culture has us on the ropes even before we even get to the conversation.

Yes.

Obviously, there's a very similar phenomenon with merely being a Calvinist with those outside of the Reformed faith. People have a knee-jerk reaction to Calvinism in general because of the slanderous false stereotypes that they have been brainwashed into believing.

Most of the folks who are vehemently anti-Calvinist likely have never read a page from a Calvinist book and have only read or heard the anti-Calvinist rhetoric from their heroes. So people really have got to take a breath, all of us, even Reformed folk.

We've got to take a breath and make sure that we are accurately understanding what somebody is saying when they identify themselves in a certain way and describe their theological and religious affiliation.

We have to make sure that we understand them accurately, especially when speaking about them publicly because, unfortunately, a lot of slander goes on where people, even sometimes well-intentioned people wanting to warn the flock, they wind up slandering people by saying things about a particular group that isn't even true.

And we're not even allowed by God's law to bear false witness against heretics. Not that we are not supposed to warn people about them, but we have to get our facts straight when we do. And I've heard vehemently anti-Catholic fundamentalists, for instance, who from pulpits have basically slandered the Church of Rome.

When you don't need to slander the Church of Rome, there is enough heresy and idolatry and superstition that truly exists in that religious system without making stuff up.

I agree.

The Upcoming Lancaster Conference and the Debate Over “Gay Christian” Identity

But I'm also excited, very excited, about a three-day event that I am working on with Luke, his dad, and the folks at Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society, September 15th, 16th, and 17th. That's a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

This is featuring Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries, and it is going to be held. We can now officially announce that this three-day event will be held at the Spooky Nook Sports Meetings and Events in Mannheim, Pennsylvania, which, according to Luke, is a gorgeous, magnificent facility, so I'm looking forward to this.

And why don't you tell us about this three-day event, Luke?

We are super excited to get that event. Spooky Nook is just a wonderful event. When we were talking about venues initially, I think there were some board members who thought Spooky Nook, and then we're just like, no, it's just too nice for us.

It's really too nice. And here we are a couple weeks after we started looking for a venue. We're looking at churches from 1975, and they're United Methodist churches, and they have Drag Queen Story out there, and we're thinking about running that facility.

That's how bad it got. We weren't seriously looking, but we were just talking about it. We were looking at pictures, things like that. We're like, man, where are we going to go? And then one of our board members, Dave, who you interviewed, just said, hey, what about Spooky Nook?

And my sister, who's the executive secretary, said, okay, well, I'll take a look. And it was totally this, well, I guess, what have we got to lose? And then she called back. She sent an email, said, hey, this is the only weekend that they don't have a sports event, and it's available, and had a really great relationship with the customer service rep that they had there.

And thankfully, we just got all the paperwork finished yesterday, and we're ready and ready to go with Spooky Nook. It's a really nice facility, but that is going to be the host. It's going to be hosting our Future of Christendom conference, and this year we're doing the Gospel at War.

We saw that there was another conference up in Canada, and they did the Church at War. And we loved the title so much, but we didn't really want to steal their thunder. So we titled it the Gospel at War because that's basically where we're at right now, especially with the agendas and narratives of secular culture and humanism.

People are starting to have conversations about the real problem around here. It's not the conservatives. It's not the Republicans. It's the Christians. And they're starting to get more specific, and that was always the goal.

That was always the goal, to put the focus on Christianity. It was never to put the focus on conservatives. I mean, that's a false battle. That's liberals versus conservatives. That's a false battle. The real false battle is between the church and the state and the powers of righteousness and the powers of darkness.

So that is the theme of our conference this year, and a special thanks to you, Chris, for hooking us up with a communication between us and James White. And I know you've done a lot of work behind the scenes, so we want to officially thank you for that, Chris, and your role in getting this conference on its way.

My pleasure and my joy, and I am so excited about it. I always love to be involved in events involving my dear friend, Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, who I have known since 1995, a dear friend who has dedicated one of his books to me, The Forgotten Trinity, who has been with me through thick and thin, through times of rejoicing and times of tragedy in my life.

He has been an encouragement and comforter after the death of my father, after the death of my dearly beloved precious late wife, and the recent death of my oldest brother. And he is just, I believe, bar none, the most gifted debater of theology alive on the planet Earth.

He would never say that about himself, but I happen to believe without hesitation that it is true, in addition to being one of the most brilliant theologians, and I am looking forward to this. And I'm not going to mention the name of the possible debate opponent yet, because it is not 100 solidified and confirmed, but I am in the process of attempting to arrange a debate with an individual who would be James White's opponent during this three-day event in Mannheim, Pennsylvania.

He is an individual who shares with us the scriptural views of homosexuality, that it is a damnable sin, that the physical exploration and activity of this sin is prohibited by the scriptures and is damnable if one does not repent of participating in it.

He does not believe in same-sex marriage, as we also do not believe in this thing, which is really a fiction. There is no such thing as a same-sex marriage. But where the debate comes in is he believes that it is completely proper for a same-sex attracted individual who professes to be a Christian to identify himself or herself as a gay Christian.

And so this is the proposed debate. The actual debater, the candidate that I had approached, I approached quite a number of them. The one who actually has accepted the challenge, we still need to go through some conversations, or at least the board of Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society has to have some meetings and conversations with whether or not the honorarium that has been requested can or will be fulfilled.

And there may be some haggling going on there. But we should know, according to Joel Saint, my guest's dad, we should know by tomorrow night or the day after tomorrow at the latest whether or not we can proceed with a 100 confirmed debate, which will take place on Saturday, September 16th.

So go to midatlanticreformation .org for updates on this, midatlanticreformation .org, and you can also go to futureofchristendom .org, futureofchristendom .org, and the updates will be there as we have them.

You can also go to ironsharpensignradio .com and look for them there. Just out of curiosity, I forgot what your dad's new title is, because he was once the chairman of Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society.

That is now your title. What is the title of your dad?

My dad is the executive director, actually. We never had a chairman. I was actually elected first as the position of chairman. He was always the executive director.

I don't know how I got chairman in my information about your dad, but I make mistakes all the time. You've got to explain, do you know how Spooky Nook came up with that name?

It's on Spooky Nook Road, and I think the road came before the warehouse. It's an old warehouse that they repurposed. It's on Spooky Nook Road, so I think the name came from the road that it's on. I could be wrong about that.

Is it a spooky road? Is there something ominous about it?

No, you're in beautiful Lancaster County. There's cornfields right across the street there, and it's just such a beautiful area. There's nothing spooky about it. It's not exactly like Sleepy Hollow out there.

It's a beautiful area. It's Manheim Township. It's a really nice place. There's nothing spooky about it.

I've got to do some research as to how that road got that name. But anyway, when we come back from our first commercial break, we're going to have Luke, before we enter into the subject of his book, The Sound Doctrine of Theocracy, we're going to have Luke participate in the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio tradition that we have where whenever we have a first-time guest who is a Christian, which would be the vast majority of times, once in a blue moon I have a non-Christian on who may have something to say that is of value to the body of Christ in spite of their being a non-Christian.

But when we have a Christian on for the first time, we have that brother or sister in Christ give a summary of their salvation testimony, which Luke will do when we come back from the first break. If any of you have any questions for Luke, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Luke Saint right after these messages from our sponsors.

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So go to royaldiadem .com, royaldiadem .com, and mention Chris Aronson of Iron Trip and Zion Radio. We're now back with Luke St., author and chairman of Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society, and we will be momentarily addressing his book, The Sound Doctrine of Theocracy, but first we're going to have Luke do what all first-time Christian guests do on Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

We're going to have him give a summary of his salvation testimony that would include the kind of religious atmosphere in which he was raised and what kind of providential circumstances our sovereign Lord raised up in his life that drew him to himself and saved him.

So Luke, please give us your story.

Yeah, sure, no problem. You said providential circumstances, and that is definitely a part of my testimony. I grew up in a very strong Christian home. We were homeschooled, five brothers and three sisters.

Mom never worked. And despite growing up in this atmosphere, I would give lip service to all of the doctrine, all of the Christianese, and all that kind of stuff, the Sunday school answers. But when I was about 15, I remember I had a dream where we were up in heaven being interviewed to see if we would actually go to heaven.

And I remember my family was being interviewed one by one. Every time someone came out of the office where we were interviewed, we'd all clap and cheer because they said, yeah, I'm going in. And then it came time for my turn to be interviewed for entrance into heaven, and I woke up before I was interviewed.

And when I woke up, it was beyond the when you wake up from a nightmare, usually you're scared for a little bit, but then this wave of relief comes over you, like, oh, it's not real. But that wave of relief never came over me.

I was still mortally afraid for a couple days because I couldn't think of of all the things that I knew, I couldn't come to terms with the question of, well, why should God let me into heaven? I'm a sinner.

I know I've sinned, and I know I've sinned against him. I know he demands perfection. So why should he let me into heaven? It was like a precursor to Way of the Master by Ray Comfort. It's that question of what did you ever do to get into heaven or why should God let you into heaven?

And I could not come up with an answer to that question. And so I started going to the Bible and searching, like, how is man justified? And that's basically the day I became reformed and the day I became a functioning, spirit-filled Christian because I essentially went to the Bible to find out how is it by works?

No, it's by faith. And, you know, Ephesians 2 .11, you know, it's by faith you're saved through faith. And it's by grace you're saved through faith, and this is not of yourself. So I started really searching the scriptures, and that is basically how I came to a saving knowledge of what Christ did on the cross.

Praise God. Well, let's now enter into the discussion of the sound doctrine of theocracy or statism in the Christian mind. Now, even promoting this interview, there were people who were stunned, shocked, dismayed that I was entertaining the idea of in any way giving a platform to the idea of theocracy.

And I'm talking about Christians. I'm talking about conservative Christians. And a lot of this, I think, is because it's a knee-jerk reaction that we were talking about before. And it's not without warrant to be cautious when you hear about things like this because especially Baptists who know history will know that they have been the brunt of or the target, the victims of persecution in theocratic governments in Europe.

And even before that, before the Reformation, where sadly you had brothers in Christ who believed in the souls of the Reformation and believed in justification by faith alone, through grace alone, in Christ alone, they cruelly and gruesomely, at times, not all the Reformers, not the Reformers themselves, but those within their theological agreement with the Reformers, those in the same nations and so forth, those involved in government, did gruesomely and barbarically torture and murder brothers in Christ.

And even before that, you had the Roman Catholic Church doing that towards Anabaptists. And even closer to our modern day, where we have Puritans in mock baptism services, drowning Baptists. There was a Baptist in England burned at the stake in 1611, the same year that the King James Bible was published.

So there are people, even who are as conservative as us, and maybe in great theological agreement with us and the Reformed faith and so on, but they want to really stomp on the brakes when they hear anything about theocracy.

So why don't you define theocracy according to how you understand it and promote it?

Theocracy, Statism, and the Christian Mind

Yeah, so the reason I wrote this book is I felt the theonomists were lacking in some of their argumentation regarding the form of government. I think there are many theonomists out there who make the mistake of saying things like, yeah, we need to get theonomy so that we can put it into our constitution.

I don't think that we can have the constitution and theonomy at the same time. I really don't. One of them has got to go. The reason I wrote this book is because I'm arguing for the form of government that is encouraged and the detailed in the scriptures, which is basically laid out in Exodus 18, where Moses is judging the people.

The people are coming to him with questions about problems that they have, and he's judging between them. And then his father-in-law, Jethro, says, well, tell you what, why don't you go ahead and set up judges of 10, judges of 50, judges of 100, judges of 1 ,000, and let them solve the minor disputes, and you take the difficult ones.

And I believe that right there is a theocratic system. That's what I'm arguing for. It's the form of government. A theocracy is a form of government, rightly understood biblically. A biblical theocracy is a form of government where the judicial branch is basically the main branch, and the executive branch is primarily fulfilled by the citizenry, and secondarily fulfilled by the government.

There is no legislative branch. I argue for this in my book. This is probably one of the biggest points in my book. There is no legislator in a theocracy, in a biblical theocracy. This is the system, the political system that sets it apart from basically every other political system out there, anarcho-capitalist, collectivist, communist, whatever you want to put in there.

They all have a legislator. They all have someone up there saying, new rule, you can do this, new rule, you can't do that. And they all have somebody making up rules somewhere. Either it's a bunch of people, or it's one person, or it's a small group of people, but there is somebody making up rules.

And what I'm saying, and what was noticeable, one of the many things that was noticeable about a biblical theocracy is there is no legislator. So if I live in a theocracy, and I die in a theocracy, and 300 years later my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren wake up in a theocracy, it's the same rules, it's the same laws.

Nothing has changed because there is nobody there to change it. God has given us, as it says in 2 Peter 1, I believe it's verse 3, His divine power has given us everything that pertains to life and godliness.

A legislator in a political system assumes that that is not true, right off the bat, that we don't have enough, we need a little bit more. There's some humans out there that have got some insight about how we should be telling people how to live.

And I wrote this book because I wanted to make the point that right from the beginning, even of this country, we got started on the wrong foot by implementing a legislator. Any nation, I say this in my book, any nation that implements a legislator is by definition not free.

Because what you're doing when you implement a legislator, have a legislator in your country as part of your governmental system, you're right off the bat assuming that God has left some vital things concerning politics out of the scriptures, that we just don't know enough, that these people are going to tell us, these politicians of all people, are going to communicate to us that here's some things God left out.