Christian Nationalism Might Be Cosplay | A Bee Interview With Dr. R. Scott Clark
The Babylon Bee talks to Dr. R. Scott Clark about his pirate name, baptizing babies, and Christian involvement in politics, culture, and the "Christian Nationalism" debate. In the subscriber portion, they dig a little deeper into Calvinism. Dr. R. Scott Clark is Professor of Church History and Historical Theology at Westminster Seminary California. He is a minister in the United Reformed Churches in North America and runs Heidelblog where you can find The Heidelcast.
Hey guys, welcome to the Babylon B Interview Show.
Really excited to be here today.
We have an awesome, awesome guest, Dr. R. Scott Clark, is with us in the studio.
I'm also here.
I'm Jarrett LeMaster.
This is Sam Greer.
We're going to be interviewing Dr. Clark today.
We're going to talk about a lot of stuff.
You are famous for kind of involvement in some scraps online.
Like you get into fights with some other Christian personalities.
And so you were going to say like Christian in quotes, weren't you?
I could see it on your mind.
And anyway, so yeah, and you're also with the Westminster Seminary of Southern California.
Yeah, Westminster Seminary, California.
Yeah.
And you have the Heidelberg, Heidel, not Heidelberg, you have Heidelblog and Heidel Cast.
That's right.
So it's safe to say you're reformed.
You're a person.
I try.
And yeah.
Yeah.
And it's the outstanding mediocre.
So that's my goal.
I strive to be mediocre.
Heidel mediocre.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think I can hit that target.
Before we get too deep in quick pleasantries, you're Dr. R. Scott Clark.
May we call you R?
Yes, certainly you may.
Now, we do like to lob our questions out there with a humorous tilt.
Another question on the name.
Yeah.
What would a pirate call you?
Oh, yeah, exactly.
That's my pirate name.
So every year on Pirate Day, it says, I'm R, Scott Clark.
Okay, that was well placed.
We got it out there.
What is Pirate Day?
What date is that?
I don't know, but whenever it comes up, I find out on social media.
So then I don't have an eye patch, though.
It is Pirate Day.
Is it really?
No.
It should be.
It should be.
I need to get an eye patch, though, because I got the bald thing going, and I've got do rags and things, and I put the eye patch.
I can find a hook.
You could do Cowboy Day well, too.
You've got a Sam Elliott mustache.
Well, and you've got Wranglers, you got the Cowboy Nights.
I am from Nebraska, and I learned to drive in a pasture in a little town that you've never heard of, but it's south of Dodge City, Kansas.
Okay, so you got out of Dodge.
I've been in Dodge, and I've gotten out of Dodge many times.
I know, I love Dodge.
Dodge City.
Well, that's great.
You're a church history expert, The Long Passion for the Reformation.
You love the Reformation.
Yeah, I teach ancient church history, medieval Reformation, and then a little bit post-Reformation.
So I cover everything from the second century AD up through the 17th century.
Then after that, it's mostly unbelief.
So I don't know.
So you speak unbelief.
Or do you study unbelief?
Sure, sometimes, but I don't, and I've taught a little bit here and there in modern theology, and my interest sort of picks up again in the late 19th, early 20th century.
Oh, wow.
Okay, so you have a pretty big gap there.
Yeah, my area of specialization is the 16th and 17th centuries.
That's amazing.
So the Reformers.
Yeah, I do the Reformers.
But in the fall, I have two classes where I teach the Fathers.
So right now, my head's full of the Apostolic Fathers and the Apologists and all that stuff.
So would you ever compare the Apostolic Fathers to like, say, the Avengers?
If they were the Avengers or the Justice League, like, who would be the major villains?
Well, the major villains would be, you know, Marcion and the Gnostics.
So, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, you could.
Yeah, you could.
Andy Stanley was accused of being a Marcion a couple of years ago.
Is that true?
All American evangelicals are de facto Marcionites.
But yeah, Andy Stanley talks like a Marcionite.
You can't talk about the Old Testament the way he does without being a Marcion.
You mean to unhitch from the Old Testament?
Yeah, too.
Yeah, that was a big deal.
Right, from the very earliest days of the Christian church, one of the things that the Orthodox did was to say there's one God, one faith, one religion, one salvation, and administered in various ways through the history of salvation.
That's just basic Christianity.
And to the Marcionites, Marcion himself said, well, you know, the God of the Old Testament is a different God.
He's a mean God.
He's a judgmental God.
The God of the New Testament is all love.
There's no judgment.
And the Gnostics did similar things.
They relegated Yahweh of the Old Testament to he was a minor deity because he created the world and the world.
The world is evil.
The world sucks.
So he couldn't be, he's not the God.
The God is accessible by secret knowledge, Gnosis.
Well, and I see, I feel like I'm running into that criticism a lot.
People, even in my church, would say that the God of the Old Testament is angry and mean and Jesus is loving and cool.
That's why I say most of the default mode for most American evangelicals is a quasi-Marcionite view of the Bible.
And that's American evangelicalism has been shot through with that and has been for a long time.
But it can be so easily defused by reading the New Testament.
Jesus is the number one teacher on hell.
He speaks about hell more than Paul or the other apostles.
And then in Revelation, there's a clarity and there's a judgment that's coming to bear on the world.
So there's not a mean Old Testament God and a nice New Testament Jesus.
They're the same.
In classic Protestant terms, there's law and gospel in the Old Testament, there's law and gospel in the New Testament.
It's the same faith.
The fundamental difference is the one is pointing to Christ and the other is in light of the fulfillment brought by Christ, the reality.
But one has got types and shadows, and those types and shadows go away.
The sacrifices, the bloodshed, the ceremonial laws, the judicial laws, those are all gone.
Those are all fulfilled.
But the substance, the reality remains.
The moral law remains.
More or less.
Morala stays.
And then you get to see things like Jesus in Revelation 16, like you were saying, where he comes out of the sky with a sword in his mouth and judgment.
Yeah, you can't understand the Revelation without knowing the Old Testament.
You can't understand the book of Hebrews, which is almost certainly written to Jewish Christians to say, no, don't go back to Moses.
Don't go back to the types and shadows.
Jesus is the reality.
Everything you are looking for is in Christ.
So don't go backwards.
But you have to know something of the Old Testament to be able to get that.
Yeah, that's amazing.
We're catching on that you're reformed with a capital R. You've already brought up types.
I'll share there was a headline pitched in our writers group.
It probably won't get published, but here it is.
It was Reformed Preacher explains how Yael and Cicero with the nail pounding in the head is a type of Christ.
That is so heady.
Well, I mean, it's a silly joke because there's certain things the capital R reformed guys are known for.
I'm going to bring up something and just lob a question at you.
It's going to be based on one of our headlines.
So I'm, you know, a Reformed Baptist dispensationalist.
So you might say, like, you took the soteriology from the Reformers and left all the rest of the Reformers.
Here's a question I'll just lob to you.
It's based on one of our headlines.
We wrote this article.
Dunkin' Donuts opens a sprinkling donuts for Presbyterians.
Now, in the punchline of our article.
Good, I'm glad you laughed.
In the punchline of our article, we said, oh, but the executive overseeing the sprinkling donuts operation shut down operations and construction when he learned that baptizo literally means to immerse.
So Dr. Clark, in light of our astute satire, would you like to abandon infant baptism here on the show?
I'm glad all three people laughed at that.
That were tracking.
That's a good side.
No.
We almost got him, Jared.
I'm a Christian.
We've always baptized infants, so we've always sprinkled.
So I love my Baptist brothers and sisters, but the case for their position is exceeding thin, especially in the history of the church.
So when you take your donuts, you sprinkle them.
You don't dunk them.
I was going to say, I love that scene where Jesus gets sprinkled by John the Baptist.
That was my favorite.
You know, that's actually almost certainly what happened.
Do you know why the ancient baptismal fonts were so large?
They were actually, I've seen them.
They're quite large.
They stood in them.
But do you know how deep they were?
No.
About ankle high, a little higher than your ankle.
They're not made for immersing.
So the very earliest baptismal fonts were huge because you stood in them.
Mikvahs.
You're talking about the mikvahs.
Well, a mikvah is a command.
It's a good work.
But I'm talking about the earliest Christian baptismal fonts are, they're like almost like tile hard baby pools.
That would be the, you know, the baby pool, the wall, the side of the baby pool is probably taller than these baptismal fonts.
When I studied in Israel for a semester, there was like, as part of the Masters University, there's an Israel Bible extension program.
It's called Ibex, and we got to go look at mikvahs, and I didn't particularly notice how deep they were because the water was so green and grimy.
Oh, yeah.
I was not interested.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, the mikvahs outside of the temple weren't that shallow.
They were the ones that they were getting, right?
I mean, I walked through quite a few of them.
Yeah, you'd have to tell me.
I said, but that's also, that's also the Jewish ritual washing right before they go into the temple.
And Jewish ritual washing isn't typically immersion, right?
You're not immersing couches.
You're ceremonially sprinkling couches.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
Mikvah culture.
Mikvah.
Yeah.
That's good.
I'll commend you, Dr. Clark, because, of course, we were preparing for this interview, consuming a lot of the content we could find on YouTube and elsewhere.
And your work is endlessly stimulating.
Like, you have a clear.
My goal.
Yeah, it's to keep you awake.
You have a clear passion for not just staying in the ivory tower.
If you wanted to stay in the ivory tower, you could keep publishing.
You've got the bona fides, you've got the credentials, but you do the podcast, you do the blogging, and you're engaged on Twitter and elsewhere.
I wanted to ask you an open-ended question.
Good or for ill, yeah.
For our listeners, what is the value of continuing to learn theology for a lay person?
Reforms theology specifically.
You're going to learn, you're going to have a theology, right?
Everybody's got a theology.
It's inescapable.
People say, well, I just follow the Bible.
Well, how do you relate this verse to that verse?
And the minute you do that, then you have a theology, whether you acknowledge it or not.
So you're going to have a good one or a bad one.
And so that's my, I was a pastor before I was a prof, and I'm still a pastor, and I've been sent by my church to teach at the seminary.
So the whole thing is tied in with the life of the church.
I do some ivory tower work, although it's getting harder to do that because of the demands that people make on me that are essentially asking me questions, asking me for help.
That's a lot of what drives me, is that the stuff that people ask me, I do like now, it just became a thing.
Half the podcast is Q ⁇ A now.
And I didn't start off doing that.
That is the Heidelkast.
That is the Heidelkast, right?
At Heidelblog.net or anywhere good, good podcasts are found there.
Yeah, I found that.
On any decent podcast app, that's what we say.
I was getting questions and I was overwhelmed.
I thought, well, I'll do them on the podcast and then people will stop asking questions.
That didn't work.
It just generated more questions.
But those questions come from a place of need.
People are saying, help me.
And some of them are really intensely practical.
Something bad's happening in my church.
Help me.
And a lot of these things are really theological.
People are doing bad things, saying bad things, treating people badly, oftentimes because their theology is poor.
They don't have a good doctrine of God, a good doctrine of humanity, of Christ, of salvation.
Because the Christian life comes out of a theology.
Your Christian life isn't isolated from your theology.
It isn't.
It's the practicum, right?
So you're living it out, you're playing it out.
Which actually brings me to the next question because your theology will inform how you behave, which then informs how you interact with the culture or something like that.
So you've been against Christian nationalism.
You've come out against Christian nationalism.
And I've heard that a lot.
I've heard, this is a phrase that we're hearing all the time on Twitter and things like that.
I didn't know what it was at first.
Well, no, and that's what I'm going to ask you.
I want to know what your definition of Christian nationalism is.
Because I honestly, and this is my, because we may be on the same page.
I just don't know because I'm having a hard time finding a working definition.
And I feel like people are throwing it out a lot.
And they accuse us of being Christian nationalists here.
I've been accused of being a Christian nationalist.
And my response was, well, that might be so, but I don't know what it is yet.
And so initially, my sense was it was a way to make people shut up.
So it was a form of bullying.
And I don't like bullies, never have.
So I pushed back, and not to defend Christian nationalism, but I don't want somebody to use a slogan to shut down discussion or debate or something like that.
But if Christian nationalism means that we're going to have a distinctively Christian, theocratic nation, if that's what that means, then yeah, I'm against that.
I'm an American and I'm a church historian.
And so I say, show me anywhere in the New Testament where somebody, any of the apostles, are asking the magistrate to impose Christianity.
You can't do it.
It doesn't exist.
The Apostle Paul had multiple opportunities to speak to magistrates.
And he never said anything about policy, monetary policy, or Christianity being the established religion.
And in the second century, you look at the earliest Christian fathers.
Some of them did write to the government.
There's an anonymous treatise.
I call it Mathetes, the disciple of Mathetes, wrote to a fellow, or gave a speech, almost certainly, to a fellow named Diognetus.
Diognetus was in the Roman government.
And he lays out his case for Christianity.
He critiques paganism in the strongest possible terms.
He critiques Judaism in very strong terms.
And then he lays out his case for Christianity.
But he never asks Diognetus to make Christianity the established religion.
The only thing we ever said before Constantine was, please quit killing us.
We promise we'll behave.
The only thing we're asking is we'd like not to have to swear an oath to Caesar or to pour out an offering to the gods.
You've given that privilege to the Jews.
You've exempted them.
Why won't you exempt us?
And eventually we did get that.
311 and then 313, Christianity was made a legal religion under Constantine.
Sunday was recognized as a holiday.
We got our property back.
And that was great.
In 381, Theodosius made Christianity the state religion, and that's Christendom.
A lot of Americans grew up under sort of the shadows of the end of Christendom, and they miss that and they want to go back.
And they're scared.
That's what's really driving this.
A lot of what's driving Christian nationalism is a form of unbelief because they're scared.
And I'm old enough to remember the world the way it was.
The world's changed pretty dramatically since 2008.
And I remember the 60s and 70s and the changes we've undergone in the last 10, 12, 15 years are in structural ways, I think, far more dramatic than what happened in the 60s and early 70s.
This is endlessly stimulating.
Like I said, stimulating.
I've got a thousand thoughts in my head, but now I'll load up another question.
Sure.
So that's helpful.
I agree.
The Apostle Paul doesn't use his platform when he's on trial a bunch of times at the end of Acts.
He doesn't use his platform to enact laws.
He evangelizes.
He shares his testimony.
He doesn't even invoke his civil rights.
Now, he's a Roman citizen.
He had civil rights.
But look at the narrative and see when he invokes them.
After he's been beaten, after he's been stoned, after he's been jailed, and then he'll say, oh, by the way, did you know I'm a Roman citizen?
And as soon as he says that, everybody stands back and says, because that was a very serious crime to abuse a Roman citizen.
That put the people who were doing the abuse in jeopardy.
He did that intentionally.
It was strategic.
So he wasn't always invoking his rights.
He did invoke his rights, but he invoked his rights in the interest of the advance of the kingdom of God, not in the interests of establishing Christianity as the state religion.
So a friend of mine, Brad Isbel, who has a podcast, Presbycast, I think brilliantly said the whole thing, Christian nationalism, is nothing but cosplay.
And that's exactly right.
So I'm not even going to debate it anymore.
Because maybe I shouldn't say this, but if I can't say it here, where can I say it?
And I've asked people, because we had this discussion on the blog, and I asked one correspondent, I said, what are you going to do with those of us who resist?
And he won't answer the question.
I'm an American.
We have a First Amendment.
We have a Second Amendment.
You try to force me to be a Baptist, an Episcopalian, a Roman Catholic, right?
Because if you want an established church, most likely, given demographic trends in this country, what's most likely to be the established church in 25 years or 30 years or 40 years is going to be Romanism.
Is that what you want?
We fought, I don't think people have any sense of American history.
I don't know if I should say this, but I think it's a fact.
We shot people so that the English would not impose bishops on us, in part.
We shot Englishmen for a lot of reasons, and Hessians and others.
But that was one of them.
So many reasons.
So what makes people think that this is going to go well now?
Well, Michael.
Okay, so I like your definition is very narrow in that it's the people that are specifically trying to create a state religion.
Because I don't see it.
I don't see that very often, though.
Like, I don't see specific religions.
That's what Stephen Wolfe's book is.
Yeah, so wait, say it again.
That's what Stephen Wolfe's book is advocating, and that's what the Roman integralists are advocating.
And so that's what's really on the table is are we going to have an established religion?
I mean, there are people who are seriously advocating an established church and exiling unbelievers, punishing unbelievers, punishing people who are not doctrinally correct.
Well, I agree with you on this.
I think this is a hard thing because we live in a pluralistic society.
And we have a constitution.
We are opposing a revolution.
So this is just cosplay.
This is not going to happen.
It's just silly.
It is not the biggest danger in the United States.
This is people pretending that something's going to happen that just isn't going to happen.
Yeah, but we're getting accused of Christian nationalism because either we voted conservative or it is absurd.
Or we didn't want Roe v. We wanted Roe v. Wade to be overturned.
So this is the other use of the word.
This is their way of saying, well, we're going to categorize you with an unfavorable label.
Right.
And then you'll be ashamed, and then you'll be quiet.
Right.
Well, nonsense.
I think Americans ought to push back against that and say, no, Christians have a place in this culture, this society.
We have a right to articulate our convictions.
And there is such a thing as natural law.
It's recognized in the Declaration.
This was literally our next question.
You opened right into it.
I was going to ask, because we saw on your Twitter that you had said a good basis for overturning Roe v. Wade or for revisiting Obergfell is natural law.
Because you basically contended it's more of a shared value between us and secularists.
I wanted to probe that.
What if a secularist pushed back and said, no, no, no, I don't buy national law.
I don't buy creational patterns.
Well, then you're not an American.
I mean, read the Declaration.
We're endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights or unalienable rights.
So sort of a secular.
I mean, look at Alan Keyes.
So just the other day, I posted a section of Alan Keyes' debate with Barack Obama in 2004 when they were both running for Senate from Illinois.
And Alan Keyes gave a great example of how you invoke natural law, right?
Nature is.
And so the way I argue this with my students is to say, if you don't believe nature is, now it's a thought experiment, if you think of doing this, don't do this.
But if you climb to the top of the clock tower, and if you were to launch yourself off, a few things are going to happen.
That's nature.
Nature is.
So there's a nature to things, and there's a nature to marriage.
As I say, I was raised on the plains.
I worked cattle some as a kid.
You have steers, you have bulls, you have heifers, you have cows, right?
There are males, there are females, and things go a certain way.
And if you grow up where I grew up, it's not really a mystery.
I mean, you know where food comes from.
You know how babies are produced.
It's all, this is nature.
Same-sex marriage is against nature.
It's against the nature of things, and it's against the nature of sex, and it's against the nature of marriage.
So if somebody says, well, I don't believe in nature, my response is, well, then you're clearly insane.
You need psychiatric treatment.
Yeah, but that's like half the population.
Yeah, half the population is clinically insane.
Well, right.
All the academics, like everyone in the universities, they're teaching all this transhumanism.
It's insanity.
So isn't it imposing, though?
Isn't it imposing our spiritual or our Christian worldview on people?
I didn't make nature.
Nature is.
I know, but voting for nature.
Asking people, expecting people to adhere to nature is not imposing.
It's just recognizing.
The founders said we're recognizing.
They didn't say we're creating the nature of things.
They said this is the nature of things.
The British monarchy, the British Empire, has transgressed the nature of a proper relationship between the colonies and the empire.
You're not living within the natural boundaries of your office, is what we said.
We didn't say, oh, we're the first people to ever see this.
We said, everybody knows this, and we're just invoking this, which is why, by the way, read Dr. King, Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail.
Why is that letter so persuasive?
Somebody tell me that the letter from a Birmingham jail is no longer valid, no longer persuasive, no longer influential, no longer compelling.
You can't say that.
It's one of the great pieces of political literature in the history of the Republic, and it's a strictly American natural law argument.
So if somebody wants to tell me this has no validity, well, so you're going to tell me, I get this from Theonymus.
We're going to impose the judicial laws.
Okay, go ahead.
Right?
Go ahead.
I mean, well, when everybody's converted.
Yeah, sure.
Okay.
That's interesting.
So what is the answer?
Because we have, we've got all these people, we talked about it a little bit, the transhumanists, like the people that are not acknowledging nature.
What's the answer to like the David Frenchian sort of beta simpy pluralistic classical liberalist sense that Drag Queen Story Hour is a blessing for liberal liberty?
Yeah, I just saw this.
I didn't read the article, but I saw bits, enough of it to see what David was up to.
Mr. French is up to.
No wave, I don't want friends.
Dave, my buddy Dave, like speed dial, yeah.
Dave French.
But like a lot of American evangelicals, it lacks this category, nature, creation.
And that's where you start with this stuff.
And this is what we've lost.
And Americans have always had to some degree a problem with nature.
We're going to remake the world.
There's an argument to be made that America is in some ways a defiance of nature.
So there's a tension in being an American.
So now it's harder to do now in the digital surveillance world that we live in.
But it wasn't long ago that if you wanted to sort of remake yourself, you could move from Tulsa to San Francisco, change your name, present yourself to the world as somebody else entirely.
And that's who you were.
You know, I think it's a lot harder now in a digital world.
So that was the great American thing.
You could just go, relocate, and remake things.
So you're not bound by family, tradition, location, language, culture, heritage, any of that.
So there's this American impulse that makes everything plastic and endlessly changeable.
So we have that impulse.
And on the other hand, we start off with nature.
So Americans have always been conflicted about this.
But a lot of American evangelicals just don't have any place for nature.
When I say the word creation, the first thing they think of is Ken Ham and a fake ark in Kentucky or wherever it is.
No, that's not what creation means traditionally in the Christian tradition.
It's a category, right?
When Jesus wants to sort out the scribes and the Pharisees about marriage, he says it was not so from the Creation Museum.
Yeah.
That's not what I saw in the Creation Museum for $29.95.
It's not so in the Creation Museum.
That's right.
Well, I get those emails.
I went to the Creation Museum, and this is what I saw.
We love Ken.
We love Ken here.
I'm sure he's a fine guy.
Not all of us are literal six-day creationists, though, so I just want to.
But the best of us are.
That's funny.
You are funny.
I noticed you made that line of argumentation in one of your sermons delivered for the Westminster Seminary Chapel.
You said creational patterns are the basis for things like, you know, you made an argument that two church services should be the way to go because well.
That's the traditional Christian practice.
It's a traditional Christian practice.
I guess it was a Jewish practice.
It was the temple practice.
And there's some, you have morning and evening.
So it's built into the pattern of creation, right?
You start the day.
We would say, and the early ancient Christian church would say, the Lord's Day, the Sabbath, the Christian Sabbath.
You start the day in worship and you close the day in worship.
And so we're the first generation to say, oh, well, no, you know, once a week on Sunday morning, as long as I get my dopamine hit, I'm good.
And that's what we've essentially said.
And I suppose the creational patterns spark that brought it to my mind was that you had basically said, you know, in creation, God didn't need to rest.
He was setting a pattern.
That's right.
I've had this conversation with people who come back to me who begin talking like pagans.
But God was tired.
He was tired.
If you think God was tired, you're a pagan.
He was tired and lonely.
That's both.
That's a pagan way of thinking about God.
One of the earliest Christian heresies is the anthropomorphite heresy, which said that God really had eyes and he really had a nose and he really had fingers and arms.
And no, these are figures of speech.
The people who, Moses, who wrote the Pentateuch, we would say traditionally under the inspiration of the Spirit, he wasn't an idiot.
He was highly educated.
By the way, in a pagan university, if there was such a thing, I mean, he had all the wisdom of Egypt.
Oh, he would have been bald, too.
He'd be in good company.
What did I make up there, too?
In all the wisdom of Egypt, right?
He used figures of speech.
And so to say that God rested is a figure of speech.
God doesn't actually rest.
He doesn't actually, in Genesis 6, repent.
It's not like he thinks one thing and looks down and thinks, oh, crap, I didn't mean that.
Dad gum.
Bleep those both.
Yeah.
This is really helpful.
So natural law, just circling back to culture for a moment.
So natural law as a shared basis for secularists and Christians that I wouldn't even like to use the word secular ist because that's a prejudicial word.
Oh.
Right?
Because secular ist says there isn't anything other than this world.
So non-Christians.
So Christians and non-Christians can coexist civilly on the basis of natural law, which was the original American arrangement.
So on that note, because that's a very helpful thing.
There's got to be a shared ground.
Your contention is that it's natural law.
My question would be this.
The founders' contention was.
The founders' contention was.
Read the founders.
So they invoke natural law all the time.
At what point does Christians, you know, acting politically, at what point does it flip a switch and now it's Christian nationalism and they're trying to impose Christendom?
Well, I think when people are insisting that the state establish a visible church or I think I got in a lot of trouble, I guess, for saying that I don't think the governor, now governor-elect of Oklahoma, stit that he should have prayed in his office as governor.
If I'm a Muslim or if I'm an Orthodox Jew or whatever, a Baha'i or a pagan or something, and I'm a citizen, tax-paying citizen of Oklahoma, and the governor of Oklahoma in his office claims the state of Oklahoma for Jesus.
And he said, I'm praying in my authority as governor.
That is troubling.
That's not an American way to behave.
That's certainly not pluralistic.
He's governor of all those citizens.
As a Christian, he has a right to pray however he will.
And as an American, he has a right to say whatever he wants.
And it's up to the citizens of Oklahoma whether they want to elect him or whatever they want to do.
That's how America works.
I'm just so I'm not saying anybody should cancel him or silence him or any of that.
But I am saying that he shouldn't have invoked his office as governor.
And it's from a theological point of view, it's just foolishness to talk about claiming the state of Oklahoma.
I have a news flash for the governor.
Jesus already owns the state of Oklahoma and everything else.
According to Psalm 2, he's seated at the right hand of the Father and he's the sovereign Lord over all things.
So that's why I'm not waiting for Jesus to begin his kingdom or assume control.
He did that when he ascended.
And he was in control when Nero put Christians on top of pikes, covered them with pitch, and set them on fire.
He was sovereign over all of that.
And he's not, we're not, I'm not waiting for him to become sovereign.
He's already sovereign.
And I'm not waiting for some earthly glory age either where, well, now he's really in charge.
No, he's been in charge all along.
That's the message of the revelation.
The churches of Asia Minor said to John, What in the world's going on?
We thought Jesus won.
And he says, Well, let me tell you a story.
And I'm going to tell it to you seven times in parallel ways.
And this is the nature of life between the ascension of Christ and the return.
Sometimes it's okay, and sometimes it's really bad, but Jesus is always in charge.
You mentioned Psalm 2.
That's the shortest commentary you'll ever get on the Revelation.
Yeah, that was actually, it's funny.
That was really concise.
I was still processing.
You were going.
It's helpful.
It's incredible.
You mentioned Psalm 2.
The nations do continue to rage.
The people continue to plot vain things, but the Lord sits on his throne and laughs.
He holds them in derision because he is sovereign.
On that note, we wanted to ask a question about culture war.
Oh, yeah.
So, culture war.
This is interesting.
It's kind of a lot, it's a lot like Christian nationalism.
It's a lot the same conversation.
But that is a phrase that we get leveled at us a lot.
And I get this from friends, from a lot of folks that I know.
They're like, Why are you engaging in culture war?
Because we're at the Babylon Beach.
I think in a lot of ways we do kind of maybe rile people up or we do things not intentionally.
We're just trying to say that we're just trying to tell good jokes, and most of the jokes are offensive.
I was actually having this conversation with my mom.
I mean, it is hard to be funny now.
It is.
I like to have fun in class, and I get in trouble a fair bit for it.
And so it's been a struggle because, you know, I like to laugh, and I think, I think, yeah.
And so there are guys who won't tour and won't do comedy on college anymore because people won't laugh at themselves or anything anymore.
So yep, it is hard.
But the culture war we kind of engage in, and we do it politically, we do it through comedy, we do it through who we vote for, we do it wherever we go, because it seems like we're in a world where, you know, there's a bestial system, there is the prince of the power of the air controls things down here too.
So Jesus even said that, you know, and maybe that changed in the ascension is what you're contending.
Yeah, I mean, there's a sense in which that's true.
Yeah.
But I mean, Satan works for Jesus, if I can put it that way.
In other words, he can't do anything he's not permitted to do.
It's not like, so we're not dualists.
They're not competing deities, not Manichaeans, right?
So I'd say that as God, the Son incarnate, he's exercising his sovereign providence.
And the evil one certainly is causing trouble.
Sure.
And he's going about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.
And we have to be aware of that and be wise about that.
But he's also on a chain.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
I always like that verse where, I mean, it says Jesus was led into the desert by the Holy Spirit to be tempted by the devil.
Yeah.
That's an interesting kind of thing, they're somehow working together.
I don't know if that's.
And he wins, right?
Jesus is brought into direct, deliberate conflict with the evil one.
And then as the last atom, he passes the test because he's offered the kingdoms of the world.
And he tells Satan to pound sand.
Yeah.
I like that version.
That was my favorite.
That was a good translation out of that translation.
That's my favorite.
That's Clark Standard Version.
Yeah, that's the plain standard version.
Yeah.
Stuffed.
I think I've been ambivalent about culture wars.
And I think there's, in as much as culture is an expression of nature, To that degree, I think we have a stake in that as participants in the natural world.
And I think you're going to have a culture, right?
It's inevitable.
And so we're either going to have a culture that is tolerable, or we're going to have a culture that encourages grown men to dress like women and dance sexually, provocatively in front of four-year-olds.
And parents are going to voluntarily take their children to that.
That's a bad culture.
We have a right to criticize that and say that's bad for those children.
Those children are being scarred by that.
And they're going to, I mean, I saw things as a young person that I didn't need to see.
And I can't imagine how the world would look to me had I been exposed to a grown man gyrating in a library.
You know, libraries used to be safe places for children with little old women with beehive hairdos encouraging me to read books that were caldicott award-winning books.
That's right.
That's how I remember libraries.
They were certainly not a place where a mentally ill sexual deviant would grind in front of a four-year-old.
That's crazy.
That's a crime.
It is a crime, and I think librarians have become activists.
They have.
Ever go to your local library?
I go with my kids sometimes.
Every book that's available for children is some kind of LGBTQ indoctrination.
We were in our library to vote, you know, to bring our drop off our ballot.
And I was looking around.
I hadn't been in the public.
It actually became somewhat unsafe because of the number of homeless people.
It had become a homeless shelter, so I hadn't been in there for a while to look around.
And I was a little surprised at what I saw in the juvenile literature section.
It was not what I remembered.
My wife used to take our kids all the time.
The frequency has decreased because she says all the stuff on display is just nonsense.
So they were definitely pushing the LGBTQ plus agenda.
It's clear evidence of what Jarrett said a couple minutes ago.
The prince of the power of the air is at work among the sons of disobedience.
But I think there's still truth to what Dr. Clark said, which is the devil is still God's devil.
He's still on a leash.
It makes me think of the opening chapters of Job where God's throne is the stage.
And Satan is, you know, he's summoned, he's called, and God speaks first.
God asks the question.
Satan leaves when he's told.
He's given only as much rain as God gives him.
That's right.
That's what I was thinking of Job.
So it, and you know, and the demons know who Jesus is.
They do.
They know.
And he tells them what he wants them to do.
And then they do what he tells them to do.
But there are a lot of American Christians, I do think, who think of the world in Manichaean terms.
You know, George Lucas catechized all Americans in Manichaean religion in Star Wars.
That's funny.
It's a Manichean space Western.
Yep.
Star Wars.
Manichaean.
I've never heard the Manichean part, but I think it's.
It is.
It's a dualistic system.
The force has to be kept in balance.
You have light and dark, good and evil, and it all has to be kept in balance.
That's Manichaeism.
It's a form of Manichaeism.
Manichaeism, Shintoism, all the kind of Eastern religions, too, right?
That could be.
I mean, you may be right.
I don't know that, but it could be.
That's good.
Well, I love this.
I think this is an incredible conversation.
I love, we're going to continue to talk to you in our subscriber lounge, but we just wanted to thank you so much for kind of enlightening us on some of these issues because I have been looking literally for definitions of these terms.
Well, let's go.
So, yeah, let's go into the subscriber lounge really quick.
Okay.
Bye, freeloaders.
Bye, guys.
BabylonB.com slash plans if you want to see the rest.
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Because it shows that there's a church history appeal to be made.
I think you made it eloquently.
Jared, would you like to invite John Calvin into your heart?
No, Augustine, please.
Thank you.
Well, you can start with Augustine.
Calvin was an avid reader of Augustine, and there were ways in which the Reformation disagreed with Augustine.
He tended to think of grace as a kind of medicine with which we're infused through the sacraments.
This has been another edition of the Bee Weekly from the dedicated team of certified fake news journalists you can trust here at the Babylon Bee, reminding you that someone out there knows something about Carmen.