PCUSA Abandons the Faith; Mormons Lack Leadership; Mark Sandlin Deceives; Good Calls

Well folks, there it is, the sad lava-less lava lamp. It's not lava-ing, and I don't even know if I can get started. Hey, my shirt matches the new color of the bug thing. That's nice. That's cool. But I may just have to sit here and do nothing until it starts lava-ing.

The whole feng shui, the whole program is completely off. I can't even say it with a straight face, actually. Welcome to The Dividing Line. Those of you in Florida, look out, here we come. Man, I think this is going to be a really fast-moving nine or ten days, given the schedule.

Traveling mercies will be appreciated. I think there's going to be a bunch of driving involved in this whole thing, too. So, head in your direction. First things up will be on Saturday, and the dialogues on Islam, and the Quran, and the Bible.

Really looking forward to that. And then Sunday I've got stuff, and I should have brought the stuff up. And then Monday, the baptism debate, and then heading for Pensacola, which everybody says is not actually Florida.

It's southern Alabama, or something like that. I don't know. But anyway, head in your direction. So, I think, isn't there a schedule up someplace? It's on the calendar. Okay. So, if you hover over the dates on the calendar, it will tell you what's going on, and the various dates, and where you're going to be, and who to contact, and yadda yadda.

I know I saw something from Chris that had, you know, just the normal, you know, stuff where you don't hover on calendars and things like that. I guess we didn't put that on the blog. Actually, if I recall a while back, I did put something like that up.

I think you did, too. I just don't remember what it was. That's the problem, is trying to find stuff. Blogs are date-driven and, you know, pile up. Yep. That's true. That's true. I'll tell you what, though.

If you can convince him that your call is cool enough, and important enough, and with it enough, to get a really good description on the call screen. What is this? Stuart Smalley today? No, no. These need to be hip calls.

These need to be not quite skinny jean calls, but something along those lines. Okay. I think we're just going to go ahead and close out the show right now. Skinny jeans. You don't want any skinny jean calls?

Okay. All right. If you can convince him to put it up there, then I might get you in somehow and shorten some of the other stuff that I've got queued up. How's that? How's that sound? Let's see if we can work that out.

So if you've just been dying over the past, because this is going to be it for a while, I don't know if any plans have been made over the course of the next week or so. No, actually, we haven't made plans, and I'm trying to get caught up on all the things that I've been doing, so I've kind of been, you know, taking advantage of that.

I see. Yeah. Okay. So this could be it. This is your shot. 877 -753 -3341. You got to convince him that it's a really cool call. And then he's got to convince me by the description. No. Huh? What? That was my call screening technique.

No. The dividing line. No. Okay. All right. All right. Okay. All right. Good luck. That's all I can say. I don't really believe in luck, but there you go. 877 -753 -3341 is the phone number. And I am so thankful that the folks at Teleport fix Teleport.

I wish they'd fix Kindle. That's not the same people, so they're not responsible for that. Anyway, as the world has gone absolutely positively insane. Okay. I don't even know where to start here. I have a series of articles, and we all know now that a couple days ago the PCUSA, which everybody says is the largest Presbyterian church in the United States.

Well, it might be, but it's been collapsing membership-wise for a very, very long time. And PCUSA finalized their abandonment of the Christian faith, believe in the Bible, gospel, things like that, by changing the definition of marriage from that of a man and a woman, which of course is the only marriage that will ever exist, to that of two people.

It's funny. I just immediately want to go end your reasoning for saying two. Why not three? Because the reality is they've abandoned any foundation for even arguing that point. They might as well just say, when you think about it, okay, marriage is no longer a lifelong covenantal commitment between a man and a woman, foundation of society, production of children, the next generation, giving every child the example of a father and a mother.

I was looking at these precious little pictures that Summer posted this morning of Clementine and Thad last night. She tucked him into bed and did all the stuff. She's doing mommy stuff. She's only two years old, but she knows to do mommy stuff.

Well, you know how she knows to do mommy stuff? Because she has a mommy and a daddy, and she gets both examples right there, the way it's supposed to be. Anyway, you have no longer that, but you have mother, father.

There was a reason that there was two, by the way, male, female. But once you start redefining things to where it's two people, then it becomes just people. And then you question why it has to be people.

And eventually, what's the result? You can't say marriage is anything. You can't define marriage. There is no definition left for marriage. And so what's the ultimate goal? The destruction of marriage.

That's what we've said all along. There are a few homosexual advocates that are honest enough to say, yeah, that's what we want, and that's what we're accomplishing. But anyway, so the PCUSA has abandoned the biblical definition of marriage.

Of course, oh, well, there was all sorts of polygamy. It was always, always, always, always, always, always, always heterosexual. You can't argue that. There is absolutely no exception to this. That's why the number is two.

It's the gender binary, which is why people are having to try to come up with new genders now because we don't want that. And no one is overly surprised by this. I'm not. Because I've told the story before, but I remember in the mid -1980s, in the mid -1980s, a friend of mine, I worked, I volunteered as a TV cameraman at the large Baptist church I was at.

And one of the guys who also did that did some work at the PCUSA General Synod convention thingy that they had here in Phoenix. And he ran a camera right in front of a group of homosexuals that were there to promote, you know, the acceptance of homosexuality.

Wasn't anything about gay marriage in the 1980s. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And if you had said, well, this is eventually going to lead to a complete redefinition of marriage. Oh, no, that's ridiculous.

What are you talking about? This is crazy, crazy stuff you're talking about, you people and your slippery slope arguments. And yeah, and I remember thinking 30 years ago, 30 years ago, any denomination that allows these people to just keep bringing this up and bring this up and bring this up and bring this up is a denomination that will not long last.

You make a statement and that's it. You take a stand, and that's it. And you move forward from there. PCUSA, 30 years ago, thought coming. Well, here it is today. It was a PCUSA church where I debated Barry Lynn.

And that was one of the reasons that they wanted to have it there is that they were one of the conservative churches. Well, look, guys, you know, I appreciate the fact that there have been, I had PCUSA professors in seminary.

There were some good men, but you've got to have seen the handwriting on the wall long before now. I mean, if you're still a part of that denomination after this amount of time. Sorry, I don't don't mean to be, you know, lack sympathy for you, but you didn't see this coming.

I did 30 years ago. And certainly you had far more evidence than I did being right there in the middle of it all. So there's really nothing overly shocking about this. I mean, you're talking about the liberal Presbyterians have decided to do what liberals do.

And once the denomination takes a stand on anything other than the highest view of scripture, there is no middle ground. It's just simply how long does it take for that particular body to fall from where it was to where it hits rock bottom?

It's just, it's just, it's just theological gravity. The theological gravitational constant is the only issue at that point because it will fall and it will eventually hit and that will be the end of that.

So I wasn't, so what makes it weird? Did you turn the fan on for me? I didn't want to keep the lava from lava-ing, but it's not lava-ing, so we might as well just kick that on and things will be nicer.

Yeah, low is fine. I mean, high would have my hair blowing like Fabio or something. Yeah, right. Fabio? Who's he? Not really butter or something. I don't know, whatever that stuff was. That's an old, that's an old commercial too.

What is that? 1990s, maybe? I don't know. I'm just showing my age. Anyway, so PCOSA doesn't surprise me, but what is leaving me just going, eh? Are the Mormons. You see this? I asked you in channel. You didn't see my question channel.

D. Todd Christofferson, LDS elder, I imagine, I'm assuming, it says LDS elder, they're actually talking about an apostle, says Mormons are free to back gay marriage on social media. An LDS apostle reaffirmed recently that Mormons who support gay marriage are not in danger of losing their temple privileges or church memberships, even though the Utah-based opposes the practice.

In an interview Friday with KUTV in Salt Lake City, elder D. Todd Christofferson said that individuals in the 15 million member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would be in trouble only for, quote, supporting organizations that promote opposition or positions in opposition to the churches, end quote.

Backing marriage equality, I, quotes, no such thing. No such thing. It is, it is, when, when one side has to use language to mean something other than what the words mean, you know that they are trying to pull a fast one.

You know that they're, they, oh, it's, backing marriage equality, that is the profaning of marriage on social media sites, including on Facebook or Twitter, quote, is not an organized effort to attack our effort, not an organized effort to attack our effort, or our functioning as a church, end quote, Christofferson said in the interview.

The KUTV interviewer asked further if a Latter-day Saint could hold those beliefs even though they are different from what you teach the pulpit. Yes, the apostle answered. Our approach in all of this, as Mormon founder Joseph Smith said, is persuasion.

You can't use the priesthood and the authority of the church to dictate, you can't compel, you can't coerce. It has to be persuasion, gentleness and love unfeigned as the words, as the words in the scripture.

Yeah, exactly how Joseph Smith did things. Ask the three witnesses about that one. So I, this whole, this whole, that is not the church leadership of the 1980s. Can you imagine Bruce R. McConkie saying that?

I can imagine Bruce R. McConkie's reaction. Yeah, I can too. And it would not be gentle. No, no, there would have been physical violence in the meeting of the 12. And be honest with you, I have more respect for Bruce R. McConkie than I do this ishy, squishy, new Mormon leadership that has no earthly idea what it's doing or where it's going.

And we're all just going the same direction and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I, the Mormons have me completely lost, but I think the reality is they're the ones that are completely lost. I mean, the direction of the current leadership.

And I'm telling you, I know where it came from. We all know where it came from, came straight out of BYU. BYU decided that they wanted to look good in the eyes of the academy. They sent their people out to get degrees at other places so they could get that credibility.

They brought all those ideas, primarily liberal Protestant ideas back with them. And the reality is Mormonism did not, by its very constitution, have the ability to resist the corrosive effort of that kind of truth decay.

Not that any truth to begin with, but especially when you talk about postmodernism and the things related to it. So I have been left stuttering. 877 -753 -3341. We've only had one phone call, but couldn't stick around to go on the air.

So 877 -753 -3341 phone number if you want to convince Rich that your call and your topic is important enough. Apparently I'm more intimidating than I thought. What? Apparently I'm more intimidating than I thought I was.

Nobody's calling. No, just one guy. He's like, I gotta go. I gotta go back to work. It's an interesting time of day. It's not our normal time of day. So maybe that has something to do with it. But some people on Twitter.

Gene, I thought it was the new normal time of day. Well, the new normal. Yeah. Well, what do you want? So in the midst of all that, a article appears yesterday called 10 Anti-Gay Things You Can't Do While Following Jesus.

And of course it was first published on Patheos, which pretty much means it's worthless, but written by a PCUSA fellow by the name of Mark Sandlin. And so if you want to know why the PCUSA has moved so far from, well, the Westminster Standards or anyone that wrote anything for the Westminster Standards or anything like that, just listen to Mark Sandlin and you'll get a good idea as to why that is.

But let's take a look at it here. All I say in all of my 10 things you can't do while following Jesus articles, this is by no means meant to be a complete list, but it's a decent place to start. Also, this is not to say that people are unable to do these things when they are following Jesus as much as saying if you are doing these things, you are something counter to the teachings of Jesus.

So here's teachings of Jesus. Number one, condone violence toward people who are LGBT. Well, that's obvious. Violence is never to be condoned. But we are now hearing a lot of people saying that, for example, writing a book, holding to, we need to come up with some really workable terms here because I don't like talking about traditional marriage.

I don't like talking about traditional family. You could talk about natural family, natural marriage. There's no question that one man, one woman is natural marriage. But when you're talking about the natural meaning of the biblical text, when it's taken at face value in its historical context, what are we going to call that is the question.

But we are hearing people in the LGBTQ, RSTUV, WXYZ community saying that if you don't, for example, use, if you do not abuse the pronouns of the English language, if you believe it is suicide, ethical and moral suicide, to grant to the human being such a denial of his created state that the human being gets to define their own gender based on how they're feeling that day.

And everybody else has to agree and utilize whatever preferred gender or non-gender or whatever, bender, lender, I don't know, they want to come up with. That's now being called an act of violence. To simply believe what Christians have believed, to believe what every single president of the United States up until the current one, and even him at the beginning, but not really because we all know about that flip flop.

Anyway, that's considered to be an act of violence. And how many times recently have we seen homosexual advocates arrested for false reporting of violence to try to create a persona? Let's keep all those things in mind.

No one's talking about physical violence. Number two, if you're a follower of Jesus, you cannot be against same-sex marriage. Now notice if we say you can't be a follower of Jesus and be for same-sex marriage, you're bigoted.

You are, you are hateful. You're discriminating. But now you've got the other side saying, if you want to follow Jesus, you can't be against it. Now it is a given without possible argumentation that Jesus never, ever, ever said a positive word about same-sex marriage.

Never, ever said a positive word about homosexuality. If he was God in human flesh, he knew there were people like that in his society, right? Never said a positive word. Never, ever said a positive word.

So what kind of massive leap do you have to develop to tell people that you can't be against what Jesus never taught as a follower of Jesus? Here's, here's what he says. Biblical marriage is one of the biggest Christian misrepresentations out there.

No, marriage equality is the biggest misrepresentation out there. Yes, in the Bible, marriage between one man, one woman. Yes, that's exactly right. Man and woman. Man and woman. There's the two, gender binary, Mr. Sandlin, it's right there in front of you.

It is also between one man, one woman, and their God-appointed surrogate mother. Huh? You're talking about leverant marriage? What are you talking about? Not only that, God frequently blessed polygamists like Gideon and Solomon.

Well, blessed them in spite of their polygamy, not because of it, sir. Jesus himself believed that if a woman's husband dies and she doesn't have a son, she must marry his brother and have intercourse with him until she has a son.

You mean the one question asked by the Sadducees about leverant marriage becomes a positive teaching of Jesus? You're an elder? You presume to hold the Bible in your hands and pretend to teach it and preach it?

I guess I'm a bit of a prude. Biblical marriage? You can have it. Two loving adults want to have a committed relationship? Yes, please. Well, those are the words of someone who has either has no clue what the Bible is about or no care about what the Bible is about.

One of the two. One of the two. And I'll let you, I'll let you decide as to which one it is. Let me see here. Where did I find his relationship, PCUSA? I think I looked it up elsewhere. Anyways, number three, one thing you cannot do is discriminate against LGBT folk.

Now, remember, this is the big term, discriminate. Discriminate? It's something every one of us does every single day, unless you are a socialist liberal, and then you never do it. No matter how often you do it, no matter how bigoted you are, how close-minded you are, you never do it.

Discrimination is good. Discrimination is positive. You must discriminate. Every time you pull up to a stop sign, you must discriminate. Every time you pull onto the street, you must discriminate because you have to choose which side you're going to drive on.

You have to choose when you're going to start, when you're going to stop. Discrimination is a good thing. You do it every single day. I'm going to discriminate against the vast majority of restaurants in the Phoenix area by picking up food from only one this evening, based upon what I want.

That is discrimination. And so we all do it. We all do it. That's all there is to it. Unfortunately, it is one of those words that just gets thrown out there. It's an automatically bad thing. I don't want to do it, so I run from it, rather than facing it and pointing out that the person who is wielding it as a club is actually a person who engages in discrimination every single day.

Discrimination based upon bigotry and prejudice without moral and ethical reflection is what we should be talking about, but then that would not work for those people that are going that direction. So Turden says he's talking about Hagar and Rachel and Leah's slaves.

I have no idea what he was talking about. I didn't bother to say. Discrimination against LGBT folk. Recently, a group of Christians asked President Obama for special permission to discriminate against a particular segment of the population.

In other words, they asked for freedom of religion. Worse yet, they want to do it while receiving government funds. Did you follow that? They want to take money that the government made through taxing everyone and then be allowed to exclude some of the very people from which the money came.

This is the most twisted leftist commie perspective you can have, okay? I mean, you've got to understand where this is coming from. Oh, did I mention this particular group is already a marginalized group in the United States?

Yep. Christians want to make money from an already marginalized group and use it to further marginalize them. In an oh-so-cliche way, ask yourself, who would you discriminate against? As I think about the answer, keep in mind that the Pharisees encouraged discrimination against women, tax collectors, the poor, and even Samaritans.

Jesus went out of his way to radically exclude them all. Now, go and do likewise. This is such a perversion of the Bible that it would be laughable if it wasn't so evil. It would be laughable if it wasn't so evil.

What these folks are talking about is exercising Christian values, Christian morals, and not being shut down by the government in so doing. You twist and pervert that into something completely different.

All the while, you should be admitting that you are marginalizing people who engage in bestiality and say they're made that way, polyamorous people who say they're made that way, incestuous people who say they're made that way, pedophiles who say they're made that way.

You big bigot, you Mr. Sandlin. No, you're just a hypocrite. You're just a glowing wide-eyed hypocrite is what you are. You know it. That's the worst part because this is purposeful twisting. You're not stupid.

You're purposefully twisting these things. That's what makes you evil. Amazing, amazing. Oh, and by the way, Jesus didn't radically include any who were unrepentant, did he? No, his message was always repent, turn back.

Such were some of you, but I really doubt you believe that Paul ever wrote that anyways, do you Mr. Sarah? If you're honest, you don't care what the tense, the verb in 1 Corinthians 6, 11 is. You don't care.

Does that matter? It's not an issue for you, is it? No, of course not. Oh, well, you got a lot of calls all of a sudden. So they, all these people convinced you, huh? What did they offer you? How much?

Nothing? There's good calls, huh? Well, oh, all right. Well, I'm going to have to, you have to believe you. You have to believe you. Oh, okay. Well, did you give him a call? Okay. All right. So John Samson has, has, has what, what happened to the queen, by the way?

Did you, did you, I haven't seen the queen in quite some time. He may have taken her with him. It may have been afraid you would do something with it. I really, it's around there somewhere. No, I, I honestly, I, I think I didn't get rid of it.

So let's see. He probably took it with him last time he was here and might, might have it. You never know when you might need that. I, I can't imagine when I would actually. But that's not under the temple stuff here.

All right. Well, anyway, so 5 PM Eastern daylight time, both days next week, both days, Tuesday, Thursday. Yep. All right. So we will have dividing line next week. All right. Okay. Good. Excellent. All right.

Well, let me just run through quickly. The rest of these things you won't do. I will try to be brief and then we'll go to our phone calls. I had queued up and if we get to the phone calls really fast, I doubt we will.

But I was ready to, to jump into some Tim Staples today. But I guess I need to turn this off because there's not enough room available. Okay, fine. Whatever. I'll deal with you later. I did have some Tim Staples and some Mary Another Redeemer and Mary stuff queued up, but we'll, we'll get there.

Every time I'm driving home and I hear Tim Staples yammering on, on EWTN, I just shudder and go, no, got to deal with that. Can't get through on the phone line. I keep getting a weird automated message.

Is it me or are there technical difficulties? Oh, we've got full lines, I guess. Okay. Well, I don't know what a weird automated message would be, uh, then all our phone lines are in use. I don't know.

Um, can't tell. All right, real quickly here. Number four, say that the Bible or God hates gay people. Um, the modern day concept of homosexual is exactly that modern day. Our con, our understanding of two people, sex and committed relationship was not something the biblical text ever addressed because it wasn't a concept they understood or thought about.

So there you go. The Bible's just an antiquated book. Holy spirit didn't know anything about it. Just didn't know anything about they're all just ignorant. That's not a Presbyterian. That's not a Christian.

That's a person who doesn't believe that the Bible is, you know, why don't you guys just get honest and say, you know what? We're out of here. We're going to, we're going to start our own religion and we might still do something with Jesus, but this Bible thing, this Bible thing, um, don't, don't really want to go there.

Number five, withhold ordination. There you go. Doesn't matter. Again, ordination requirements in the Bible. They didn't know anything about that. Jesus didn't know anything about the spirit. We are so much smarter than God, the spirit church, everything.

Um, believe being gay is a choice. Oh yeah. No one's ever chose that. It's never an act of rebellion. Uh, believe it's okay to be gay. If you're a celibate, catch this now, even those who admit their same sex orientation.

Now, if they choose to be celibate, they are under attack too. These people, these people are the biggest bigots on the planet. I mean, they are bigoted to a level that is beyond conception. It's just amazing that they can sit around and talk about how inclusive they are when the reality is you don't agree with them.

You're even just a little bit. Wow. They will come out. They're totalitarians. They're habs. They will Brooke. No difference. No, no, no, no, no, no. Uh, support gay conversion therapy, which another way of saying is you, you better accept our dogmatic teaching.

That man is made up of his genes. That's it. He has no choice. Ignore all those people who have been helped. No, no, no, no, not a one. You can't believe anyone has ever, and think that the gay agenda is anything other than wanting to be who they are and love who they, who they love.

Just the, the, the naivete and dishonesty. The last one there is, especially in light of the article we read just on the last program, where the, the gay advocate admitted this one, I'm, I'm after your kids and I'm open about it.

There, there you go. Um, and this person, uh, Mark Sandlin name, shame on you, Mr. Sandlin, shame on you. Uh, thankfully most of us know that you are absolutely trying to pull a fast one on all of us.

We know better, but the reality is, uh, sadly, um, many people in our society do not know. And, uh, that kind of dishonesty spin perversion of the text of scripture, horrific, absolutely horrific. You will, sir, you will, as a man who has claimed the name of Christ be held accountable before his judgment seat for that perversion of his word.

And I would never want to stand before him in your, in your shoes. My goodness. I, I warn you, repent and turn, sir. Repent and turn. That's the only thing anyone could ever say to you. Uh, is there any particular order here?

I just, the way they, well, the first one's the second one, according to this. Oh, all right. I said no to the first call. You said no to the first call. You're, you're just mean. Uh, I have no idea what the tweet I just read was.

I'm not even going to try. All right, let's, uh, jump into them here. These are all under the direct responsibility of rich peers. Okay. All of these calls, whatever the topic is. Okay. That's why I did it this way is, you know, here we go.

Let's talk to Jerry. Hi, Jerry. Hey, how you doing? Good. Uh, yeah. You know what? I really appreciate you. You know what, Jerry? It smells like a week old question. Yeah. Okay. All right. Okay. I'm just curious about something you said last week concerning theonomy, uh, especially coming from somebody who, uh, when you said you needed to read a stack of books to comment up your standard on the subject of theonomy, why you needed anything other than the acts 15.

Well, a couple of things. Uh, a lot of people misunderstood what I said. I'm not really sure why I went back and listened to it. And, and I'm not sure what the problem was. I said, I would not review a debate that took place between Joel McDermott and, uh, JD hall because to do so would require my checking out all of the conflicted and confuted references, especially that came out after the debate, which would require looking at, um, a couple thousand minimally pages of documentation, um, to determine the context of the disputed citations and all sorts of things like that.

And I don't have time to do that. I don't even have a lot of interest in doing that. To be perfectly honest with you, there's plenty of folks that can do that kind of stuff. And I'll let JD and Joel, uh, hammer out if they feel that somebody else misrepresented a certain citation or whatever else it might be.

Uh, I don't know why anybody heard me saying anything other than what I said. And that, that is I leave tomorrow on Saturday. I have two dialogues with any mom. I speak twice on Sunday. I have a debate Monday on baptism.

I speak the entire rest of the week. I've only a week home, go to Spain to debate a Jesuit on the reformation of the church in May. I have, um, uh, the trip to Texas. I've got at least one debate. I don't know how many sermons to do there.

I'm teaching in Kiev and Zurich. I've got, I've got books I'm writing and I just don't feel that it's appropriate for me to abandon, um, all the things that I've committed to do to all of a sudden shift over to a completely different topic on a subject that is not overly central to anything that we're doing.

And so I agree with all that. Yeah. Well, and then when you say, I thought 2000 years ago and I, it bothers me that it keeps coming up. No, no, we have to get every day. Every generation has to keep beating it back.

Well, no, no, I, I don't. And I don't agree with that either. Um, uh, acts 15 is the reason I raised the issue of acts 15 is not because, uh, the theonomist that I know are trying to introduce the Galatian heresy.

Um, there are certain statements that they have made that the, some have made that some leaders have made that are troubling, but they've also all made statements affirming Sola Fide and denying that they are in any way attempting to, uh, introduce Galatianism or Judaizing of anything.

That's obviously, I know they all did not, did not, but that's what they're trying to do. But I can't hardly, I can't make a distinction myself. You may be sharper than I am. I can. Um, I know theonomists, uh, who will clearly make the distinction.

Um, the issue really is consistency and, uh, there always needs to be a tremendous concern given the centrality of the condemnation of legalism in the new Testament, uh, and the tendency of people to move that direction.

Um, so that, that always has to be absolutely central to anything that's being said. But I know theonomists, uh, who are self-professing theonomists who are far clearer in their, their affirmation of grace, um, than in anything that could even come close to a form of legalism.

So I'm, I, when I brought up Acts chapter 15, that's not what I was saying when I brought up Acts chapter 15. And again, a lot of people just jumped on this and missed what I was actually saying. When I brought up Acts 15, I was talking about the fact that Acts 15 allows the Christian gospel to transcend any political national, uh, cultural boundary because it does not bring with it any kind of commitment to a specifically Jewish, uh, lifestyle or culture that is required before one can become a Christian.

And I was raising that in the context of the fact that Islam never had an Acts 15 and therefore Sharia is part and parcel of what Islam has to bring when it does Dawa. And I had all sorts of people, some utter hotheads that are not even worth taking the time to listen to, but others that I think just had knee jerk reactions thinking, Oh, you're saying theonomists are Muslims.

I, I did not say that anyone who will listen to what I'm saying will understand that I'm talking about, uh, keeping the gospel free and powerful to transcend any man-made human barrier to it by making sure that we're focused upon the gospel and not upon anything that we are adding to the gospel.

Um, no matter how appropriate our concern about honoring God's law may be. And these are, yeah, I completely understood all that. I really appreciate that point too. Yeah, I think that's important. I didn't misunderstand you at all.

And in that respect, I was just completely. No, Jerry, Jerry, you're, you're, you're making an equal mark between theonomy and Jude and Judaizing. And that's what, that's what I need you to explain to me because I haven't been able to make that distinction.

Well, I respect you enough to know that, you know, well, if you can explain it to me, okay. Well, well, well, very briefly, a, a theonomist is not going to say that you are justified by your keeping of the law is not going to say you're going to have to get circumcised before you can be justified as Judaizers were, uh, a theonomist is, is insisting that God's law remains a valid main remains the only valid divinely revealed, um, source of morality and ethics amongst man.

Now I disagree with the leading theonomists in regards to the nature of civil laws and punishments on the subject of what was given to a theocracy and what remains valid in light of that and what could then be taken from that and applied to other nations.

Now, there are some theonomists will say, I don't know that we really disagree on some of these things, but then there are others that do. There's all sorts of, there's, there's a huge gradation amongst theonomists.

And I, I think theonomists don't do themselves a whole lot of, of, um, favors by not pointing out what those gradations are. Um, but a, a theonomist, a good, a good theonomist, a biblical theonomist is going to emphasize the gospel before any emphasis upon, uh, proclamation of law.

And they don't do themselves any favors when they get that backwards. So I'll bring up a name here. Yeah. Tell me which camp he falls in. Is he a Judaizer or just, uh, he's a federal visionist. Um, that's a whole new issue.

That's a, that's a, that's a whole other area. You wouldn't put him in the, in the camp of theonomists? Well, I don't know where he puts himself. All I know the last, last time I heard Steve Schlissel speak was probably a year after, and I didn't hear it personally.

I mean, listen to something. Uh, it was probably a year after the Auburn Avenue Presbyterian conference that started the federal visionist movement. So that was quite some time ago. And so I, I don't even think of Steve Schlissel in theonomic terms.

I think of him in federal visionist terms, which is troubling enough. Um, so when I'm thinking of theonomists, the big names are people like Rush Dooney and Bonson. Those are the two big names. And there's differences between those two.