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Sept. 21, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:45
THE SCHEMER Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 179
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Special Counsel John Durham has uncovered a deeply corrupt scheme by the Hillary Clinton campaign to falsely pin Russia collusion on Trump.
but Durham really needs to go after the head of the snake and her initials are HC.
How the Senate parliamentarian frustrated Chuck Schumer's attempt, a very sneaky attempt, to put a million, millions of illegals on a shortcut to citizenship.
A Texas abortion doctor says he's still doing abortions, even though it's illegal in the state.
It's time for him to be sued and I'm thinking of doing it myself.
Dr. Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor of First Baptist Church joins me to talk about the responsibility of Christians in a secular age.
And finally, I'm going to do my own exposition of Martin Luther's great doctrine, the central doctrine of Christianity, justification by faith alone, sola fide.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I think we all know that Hillary Clinton is a deceitful, slippery, malevolent character.
And just how malevolent she is, is revealed in John Durham's latest indictment.
Now, several years ago, I made, of course, the movie Hillary's America, in which I tried to plumb the bottomless depths of Hillary's corruption and deception.
Here's a short clip from that film.
Take a peek. We've learned the secrets of the Democratic Party.
What's her secret?
All these investigations, all these deleted emails, all these hidden files.
What does she have to hide?
This woman, I guess a little bit like her husband, has a lot of secrets.
And one of the secrets that Durham is pursuing...
Is Russia collusion, which seems to have been a criminal operation directed by the Clinton campaign from start to finish.
It involved other people.
It involved lawyers, tech executives.
It involved a British spy.
It involved the media.
It involved the FBI. But it was centrally driven.
The mafia operation was carried out by the Clinton campaign and by its top officials.
Now, essentially what we see is that Russia collusion was a false narrative.
It was put out by the Clinton campaign, a fabrication of the Clinton campaign, who were working intentionally to pin this on Trump, recognizing that they had, you may say, cooperative liars in the deep state, cooperative and or gullible dupes in the media.
And this is how they could pull it off.
They had all the actors who were necessary to get this done.
Now, when you read the Durham indictment, and I've read it carefully, 27 pages long, it starts off with a kind of a mystery.
The actual charge against Michael Sussman, the Democratic attorney, is very modest, lying to the FBI.
Now, that's a felony, but nevertheless, that indictment could have been one paragraph.
Michael Sussman lied to the FBI.
He didn't disclose that he was working behalf of the Clinton campaign.
This is a crime, and therefore, we are indicting him.
End of story. But why the 27 pages?
Because as it turns out, when you read the 27 pages, the full indictment, there's a lot more there.
It's not just about Michael Sussman.
This guy himself is a kind of operative.
He's doing someone's bidding.
And the interesting questions, and we don't know if Durham will uncover all these stones and push forward with all this, is who?
Whose bidding is he doing?
I think I know the answer to that.
Well... Let's pursue the story.
A word about the Alpha Bank.
Alpha Bank is a private bank.
It's the largest commercial bank in Russia.
But it's obviously connected in complex ways to the Putin regime.
And basically what the Hillary campaign was trying to do is not show, because there aren't any, but manufacture bogus connections between the Alpha Bank and Trump's organization.
Try to show that there were all kinds of internet links We're good to go.
Interestingly, Durham reveals the deep role played by tech executives.
Not one, but many. The senior tech executive, a very high up guy, unnamed.
I'm eager to know his name.
This is a guy apparently vying for a top job in the Hillary Clinton administration.
And what he does is this guy runs an internet company that apparently has a lot of access to Including access to the internet that is not available to others.
Why? Because his internet company offers domain name resolution services.
And that means that what it does is it contracts itself to companies that are looking to sort of change or modify their domain names.
And because it does this and there's cybersecurity issues involved, the government gives these people, these companies access to a lot of information that is not public.
Now, basically, this tech executive said, I'm going to use this information.
I'm going to use this access illicitly for political purposes.
And he rounds up all these other, quote, researchers.
Now, the researchers are not entirely dishonest.
They begin to look at this, and you can tell from the indictment itself and from their quotes, they're queasy about it.
They say things like, this is a red herring.
There's nothing here.
There's no real connection.
And the tech executive who's pushing them basically goes, that doesn't matter.
We're not really trying to prove anything here.
We're just trying to create a narrative.
It's almost like we need bait.
So we want you to supply the bait.
And these guys obviously are on that guy's payroll.
They're eager to please him, so they go along with it.
So, The point here is the whole story is a setup from the beginning, and the computer scientists are in on it.
Now, Alpha Bank, to its credit, has sued these guys.
Alpha Bank basically said, and they've commissioned an independent report.
I want to read a couple of lines from the report because it says that really what happened was that...
These computer researchers working for this internet executive, quote, may have artificially created activity, meaning internet activity, to do what?
Quote, to make it appear as though a connection existed.
Between who? Between Alpha Bank and Trump.
So there was no connection.
They faked the connection.
And now, there's another interesting wrinkle here, and that is that Sussman and his partner, his law partner, Mark Elias, these were the guys, by the way, who hired the company Fusion GPS. You remember the Steele dossier?
Remember that whole bogus operation intended to, involving, by the way, the corruption of the FBI itself?
because when the FBI went to the FISA court with the Steele dossier, they did not say this has been largely, if not entirely funded by the Hillary campaign and by democratic donors.
They never told the judge that.
Why?
Because if they did, the judge would be more suspicious perhaps about granting the FISA permission.
Now, in the report by Christopher Steele, the British spy who was the key compiler of the Steele dossier, Christopher Steele was asked, he talks about Alpha Bank, but he clearly knows nothing about Alpha Bank.
Why? First of all, he doesn't know how to spell Alpha Bank.
Alpha Bank is A-L-F-A, Alpha Bank.
He spells it A-L-P-H-A, Alpha Bank, like Alpha, Beta, Beta.
So he knows nothing about it.
At one point, he's pressed about it.
What do you know about Alpha Bank?
And he goes, well, all I know about Alpha Bank was given to me by this guy, Michael Sussman, the very guy indicted by Durham.
Now, where does Hillary come into this?
Hillary comes into this at the very end.
I mean, this is the mistress of all lies.
And so once this false story is put out, she obviously knows all about it.
Her people put it out.
She puts out her tweet.
It's time for Trump to answer serious questions about his ties to Russia.
I mean, the chutzpah, the knowing deceit.
You know, I mean, when I think about Bill Clinton and his deceits in a different area, I think about Hillary, I just think, you know, these are two little demons right out of Milton's hell.
You know, one is Belial, one is Beelzebub, which is which, you figure it out.
But one thing I do hope is that John Durham figures it out.
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You need to use promo code DINESHDINESH. The Senate parliamentarian, her name is Elizabeth McDonough, has three words for Chuck Schumer.
No can do. Now, I realize that no can do is a little bit of a, it's an unwoke term these days.
You know why? Because apparently at one time, in its origins, no can do was a kind of...
Imitation or a way of doing Native American talk.
The Native Americans, of course, when they first negotiated with the white men, didn't know English very well.
And they said things like, he here, son up, no can do.
So evidently this is the etymology of this phrase.
But nevertheless, the message from Elizabeth McDonough to Chuck Schumer is, I'm not going to let you include a plan to provide 8 million green cards to Let's think about this for a minute.
The budget reconciliation bill is a bill that's about the budget.
It's about coming to terms with not profits and losses, but revenues that the government takes and expenditures that it puts out.
And sure, Congress is entitled to advance a budget bill, debate a budget bill, go through the reconciliation process.
Particularly when you're dealing with a bill that is not bipartisan, that is moving ahead on one-party strength that it actually expects to try to pass over the heads of the other party, even though the parties are virtually tied in the Congress.
Nevertheless... This budget bill, the Democrats are hoping to make it a bill about something completely different.
They're trying to smuggle in this ambitious plan.
Think about it. In complete contravention of existing immigration laws, they're trying to put in a new law in effect that takes these 8 million people and says, you know what?
You're not illegal anymore.
You're not DACA anymore.
You have a green card, which is a pathway to citizenship.
Now, I know because I had a green card.
I think I got my green card right around 1985.
And I was on a five-year naturalization road.
So by 1991, my turn came up and I went down to the court and I took the oath.
And it was a very important day for me.
But the point is that Elizabeth McDonough here says to Schumer in her statement, she goes, the policy changes of this proposal are...
Outweigh the budgetary impact, and it is not appropriate for inclusion in reconciliation.
So what is she really saying?
She's saying this is not a budget issue.
Yeah, of course, any policy, no matter what, let's say if you give someone a green card and it costs the government $35 to process it, there's some budgetary impact.
But the budgetary impact here is negligible.
The real issue is you're making a significant alteration to immigration laws and you're doing it under the guise of you're just kind of smuggling it in or slipping it into a budget proposal.
So... Now, can the Democrats forge ahead nevertheless?
Answer, no.
Why? Because the only way for them to do it is they need 60 votes.
They can override the parliamentarian, but they need 60 votes.
Do they have 60 votes in the Senate?
Obviously not. And so this nefarious plot, this scheme to try to get 8 million people to, I won't say become citizens because the Democrats don't care about that, become Democrats.
That's really what they're after.
This has at least for now been...
Shut down by Elizabeth McDonough.
What do you intend to do about inflation?
In their recent budget proposal, the White House Budget Office forecast inflation for this year 2.1 percent, the real rate over 5 percent.
The point is inflation's here, it's coming faster than our government is prepared for, and their solution is to stick their heads in the sand.
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Would it be fun to sue an abortion doctor?
I mean, what could be greater than that?
I think it's great.
Debbie's not so sure.
But there's a Texas abortion doctor.
This guy's name is Alan Braid.
He's in San Antonio. And he wrote an article in the Washington Post in which he basically said that even though Texas now has a law...
That makes it illegal to abet or procure, help someone to procure an abortion.
And that person would be vulnerable to being sued, sued even by private citizens in or even outside the state.
Nevertheless, the doctor says that he has a moral obligation, moral obligation, he has a moral obligation.
Anyway, he is not only intends to continue to do it, but he has already done it.
He He said that just a few days after the law went into effect, he performed an abortion on September 6th.
And it's kind of like one of these, I dare you to sue me.
Now, two people have already filed suit against this guy.
But both the suit, both the guys, both the lawsuits are a little strange.
Let me tell you about them. So the first lawsuit is filed by an Arkansas man named Oscar Stilley.
Now this guy is apparently a disbarred lawyer.
Not only a disbarred lawyer, he was convicted of tax evasion by the federal government.
He apparently served 10 years, 10 plus years in prison.
He's still under home confinement.
So he's basically a guy who's in the lockup.
And his motive for suing has nothing to do with abortion.
In fact, he says, I'm not pro-life.
He goes, he goes...
He notices that there's a kind of a bounty that if you sue, you might get $10,000.
And I want to quote him. This is from the New York Times.
He goes, quote, if this is a free-for-all and it's $10,000, I want my $10,000.
And he goes, and yes, I do aim to collect.
So this guy is after the cash.
Now there's another guy. An Illinois man named Felipe Gomez, who has also filed suit.
But this guy's not against the doctor.
He's actually on the side of the doctor.
He describes himself as a, quote, pro-choice plaintiff.
And his idea of suing is he wants the doctor to use the defense that the Texas law is unconstitutional and he's hoping that a Texas court will agree.
So his... Strategic objective here is not to uphold the Texas law, but to try to bring it down.
But obviously, I'm thinking about entering this frame myself, and I'm sort of checking into it to find out what is involved.
But I would love to sue this guy myself.
Of course, I'm not after the $10,000.
In fact, I want to say right now that if I can collect $10,000 from the...
First of all, it's the best $10,000 I will have collected.
Second of all, I'm going to make the doctor's life even more miserable by doubling the money and donating the entire amount to Texas Right to Life.
I'll be really happy to give it to the San Antonio Division of Texas Right to Life.
And this will teach this guy a bit of a lesson.
So yeah, there's...
You know, You can skirt the law.
I mean, I did.
But if you do, you should be willing to face the consequences.
And I'm happy, in this case, to be on the plaintiff's side of that.
So I'll report to you over the next days and perhaps weeks where this all ends up.
But what I'm looking into now is the idea...
As a citizen, and the beauty of the Texas law is it provides standing to citizens in Texas.
I don't have to prove that I'm directly harmed by the law.
I'm harmed by the law by the simple fact that there is killing, the termination of life going on in Texas, and as a resident of Texas, I'm obviously affected by it.
So, this Texas doctor, I think, has stepped out front.
I'm really glad he has, because he has sort of made himself a target, and I, for one, am getting ready to take aim.
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There is a statement about Mahatma Gandhi that is kind of telling.
Gandhi, of course, was always famously seen wearing almost no clothes.
He was a guy who would present himself as in extreme poverty.
But, of course, he was supported by the Indian mill owners who were kind of bankrolling, if you will, his political campaigns.
And at one point, one of the senior mill owners was asked, they said, Wow, man, this Gandhi, I mean, you know, it's so impressive, his poverty.
And the mill owner goes, well, you have no idea how much money it costs to keep that man in poverty.
In other words, the mill owners, this was a staged operation for political purposes.
And I mention all this because I was just reading the backstory on AOC and her famous dress, Tax the Rich, that she wore to the Met Gala.
Now, I stumbled upon an article that actually appears in a PR newsletter.
It's called PR News Online.
And they're boasting about all the PR companies that orchestrated this.
So this was not something where she got an idea or her working class friend decided to design the dress.
No, this was planned.
Apparently, there's a company called Berlin Rosen, which was behind this.
And I'm now reading just from the press release.
As many PR practitioners know, utilizing a public platform to deliver a message doesn't happen overnight.
So they've been planning this.
They say, in this case, Berlin Rosen worked with the designer, creative director Aurora James, as well as with Ocasio-Cortez's PR team.
So you've got the outside PR team, the inside PR team, the designer, and her team all working to do this.
And they say, quote, This included prepping materials that highlighted talking points for the Congresswoman and James, so they were fed, talk about this, this is the statement you need to say, as well as offering select reporters nuggets of info without giving everything away.
Then, um...
This woman who's representing one of these PR agencies says, quote, the whole point was to make it a surprise.
In other words, it wasn't a surprise, but we have to make it a surprise.
And teeing up the right reporters.
In other words, we've got some suckers who are on the left.
They're on our side. All we need to do is get them all excited so that they had the context behind the look.
So in other words, pretend like this is about some grand cause, whereas it's not about that at all.
So then the question becomes...
And of course, it's very easy to say hypocrisy, hypocrisy, but what is this really about?
What are these people, AOC, and this designer, Aurora James, after?
Well, I want to suggest that what it's about is this is ultimately about careerism.
This is about figuring out a way to play cultural politics in a way that gets a lot of fame and a lot of money into your pocket.
Let's check this theory out by looking at the designer Aurora James.
Now, Aurora James is a buddy of AOC. According to AOC, she's a working-class gal.
She's basically kind of been struggling.
She believes, as AOC does, in social justice.
Now, first of all, if the woman is struggling, It's a little interesting to notice that just recently, in fact, September of 2020, so a year ago, she bought a $1.6 million residence in a tony Los Angeles suburb called Hollywood Hills.
So, this is not somebody who's particularly indigent.
Second, although AOC got a free ticket to the Met, she's a Congresswoman, the other woman, Aurora James, did not.
Now, how did she get there? How did she pay the $35,000 ticket to come?
Well, answer, she's dating a billionaire.
She's dating a guy named Benjamin Bronfman.
Bronfman is the son of the Bronfman fortune.
This is a distillery fortune.
They make whiskey and all kinds of stuff.
The boyfriend is worth an estimated $100 million.
So this is the rich and famous posing as working class, even as they leverage their connections to try to get more media exposure and obviously greater media.
Now, interestingly, this Aurora James, according to the New York Post, they did a little bit of an investigative job on her.
Our side rarely does these.
I'm glad we're doing it. Anyway, it turns out she's a notorious tax deadbeat.
She owes over $100,000 to the IRS. Her parent company does.
She's also a rent deadbeat, which means that there have been eviction efforts to throw her company out of their premises, and a previous landlord also sued her for unpaid rent.
The New York Post interviewed some people who work for this woman, Aurora James, and they say that she basically runs a sweatshop.
What she does is she wants to hire people and not pay them, essentially modern-day slaves.
So she calls them interns.
So the idea is to call them interns, don't pay them, make them work long hours, and keep all the money for yourself.
So this woman's got an incredible racket going, and of course, I'm not surprised that she and AOC are pals.
AOC's got an even bigger racket going herself.
So... What you have is that AOC says when she's put before the cameras that the reason she's doing this is she wants to send a powerful message.
But the real message for people who are willing to read between the lines is here are two very cunning, ambitious careerists who have come not to do good for society, but to do very well for themselves.
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Recently, Debbie and I saw a fascinating documentary.
It's called Nothing But The Truth.
And it's an argument for telling and speaking Christian truth in the public square.
By the way, if you want to see the movie, go to nbttmovie.com.
Now, one of the prominent figures featured in the film is Dr.
Robert Lennon. Jeffress, I'm delighted to welcome him to the podcast.
He's the senior pastor of the 14,000 member First Baptist Church in Dallas.
He's also a Fox News contributor.
You've probably seen him on Fox.
Dr. Jeffress, thanks for joining me.
It's a real pleasure to have you.
Let me start by asking you about something you talk about in the film.
You talk about going on the Bill Maher show.
And you talk about the fact that there were people in your entourage who said to you, Hey, why would you want to go on Bill Maher?
He's a notorious atheist.
This guy is no shame.
What possibly can you, a pastor, accomplish by going on a show like that?
But talk about why you decided to go and talk about your experience about what happened when you got there.
Well, you know, they had called me up, Bill's producer, and asked if I would come out.
And I thought, well, you know, to go on a national show and get to talk about truth, why wouldn't you do that?
And then after I accepted the invitation, I started watching the show and watched them.
And I thought, what have I gotten into?
And we had our students, our pastors, prayer partners praying.
But Dinesh, what I came up to understand was, you know, I said if the Apostle Paul had the courage to go to Mars Hill, I should have the courage to go to Mars Studio and speak what I felt like was truth.
And I went in there with trepidation.
You've been on the show before and, you know, At first, the audience kind of hissed and booed at some of the things I was saying, but then they started applauding.
And I tell you, Bill couldn't have been any nicer or kinder to me, allowing me to share the gospel.
And, you know, one of the things I remember, we went to the after party after the show was over, and he and I talked for about 30 minutes about some of the issues we had talked about and so forth.
And he said, you know, Pastor Jeffress, I don't agree with one thing you believe in, but you're a great representative for what you believe is truth.
And to me, I think that's how Christians need to engage in the public square.
We don't need to be fearful.
We have the truth on our side, but we don't need to be angry and foaming at the mouth either.
We need to be happy warriors for the truth of God, and I know you do that, and I think that's what God honors.
And by the way, that's what I saw with Adrian Rogers, the subject of the film that you're talking about.
Adrian was what I used to call a velvet-covered brick.
I mean, he was hard in his convictions, but he was soft with people.
He understood that in the end, the goal is not to win the argument, it's to win the other person.
Let me ask you about our peculiar predicament today in America.
I mean, if we lived in America 50 or 100 years ago, we would be living in a society that by and large took Christian assumptions for granted.
You wouldn't have to explain to people why they should follow the Ten Commandments Even if they weren't Christian or even Jewish or even believers at all, they'd be like, yeah, that's a good way to live.
Obviously, society would be better if we honored our parents and we didn't steal.
Whereas today, we're living, you'd have to say, either in a morally pluralistic society or perhaps even in a radically secular environment.
So, talk about how do you communicate truth.
And we're talking here about biblical truth.
To people who might say, well, I don't accept the authority of the Bible to adjudicate the matter.
Well, I think there are some sound reasons for obeying the principles of the Bible, even for those who don't obey the Bible.
But I think you've pointed to something that's very real.
I think what we're seeing right now is the end of cultural Christianity.
And I don't think that's a bad thing, really.
I think, you know, Somebody said socialism works until you run out of other people's money.
Well, cultural Christianity works until you run out of other people's faith.
And I think although this country was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, I do think that as generations have unfolded, people have forgotten that foundation and they've tried to live off the morality of other true, sincere Christians.
And I believe it's a good thing in the sense that people don't say they're Christians because the culture says it's popular.
I think we have a chance to get back to first century biblical Christianity.
And ultimately, I'm not sure there's a sound argument, though, to make to people of why to obey God's precepts, unless you believe in God and God's word.
Now, that's a very provocative phrase, this notion of a cultural Christianity that you're, I think, defining as somehow uprooted from the foundational beliefs of the faith.
Define cultural Christianity.
Are you talking about people who habitually manifest Christianity even though there isn't, in fact, that inner belief?
Is that what you mean by cultural Christianity?
Right. There was no solid theological foundation upon which they based their beliefs, and I think it makes them subject to the whims of society.
I mean, why say marriage is between a man and a woman?
What's the basis for saying that?
Who has the right to say that?
And without a firm foundation in God, there really is no reason to say that.
Everybody is right in his own eyes, and that's the prescription for moral chaos.
I hear Debbie and I have a friend.
Debbie went to school with him.
He's a pastor, a really nice guy.
And we recently, just this past Sunday, were listening to his sermon.
And he was talking about the fact that he's a guy, he says, I've got my political views.
He goes, and you can come have lunch with me and I'll tell you what those are.
But he was implying that this is not something that he thinks is appropriate for him to talk about in the pulpit.
And I've heard other people say things to the effect, and these are by and large people who are conservatives, but they say things like, we're not here to save society, we're not here to save souls, we're not even here to save America, we're here to save souls.
And so we need to stay above politics, we need not to worry about earthly things, we have a higher mission.
What do you say to people who think like that?
Well, I think there's a little bit of truth wrapped in a lot of error in those kind of statements.
I mean, I do think it's true that the primary mission of Christians is not to save America, but to save Americans from the coming judgment of God by introducing them to faith in Jesus Christ.
But I don't think that allows us to be isolationist and to get in our holy huddle and wait for the second coming.
The reason I get involved politically is because I believe Jesus commanded us to be salt.
In Jesus' day, salt was a preservative.
It didn't prevent the decay of meat, but it delayed the decay of meat.
And I think what we're trying to do is to prevent the premature decay and destruction of our nation and our world so that We can have longer to share the gospel with people before the Lord returns.
And so I think that is the reason for pushing back against evil by electing officials who will implement policies that are in keeping with God's word.
I think the Proverbs say that a nation is blessed that has a godly leader.
The psalmist said, blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.
And so I do think Christians ought to permeate Hollywood, California.
You've done that with your films.
They ought to permeate government.
They ought to permeate business.
Again, to be that salt, that retardant to the decay that is coming into the world.
Yeah, this is awesome stuff, folks.
If you want to see Dr.
Jeffress in the movie, the movie is called Nothing But The Truth, nbttmovie.com.
As I mentioned to you, Dr. Jeffress, I'd love to have you back so we can go into some of these topics in greater depth.
We just thought of bringing you on because we just watched the movie.
We're kind of fired up by it.
Thank you so much for coming on, and I hope you'll come back.
Thank you for having me.
We asked and you responded.
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I want to talk today about Martin Luther's elucidation of what he took to be the central doctrine of Christianity, justification by faith alone, sola fide.
Now, Luther didn't start out by emphasizing sola fide.
He started out, in fact, as a kind of inside man who was criticizing the Church for its excesses and abuses.
And I talked about this yesterday.
I don't know.
No. Luther basically said, listen, you can have indulgences, but don't emphasize them more than what?
Not faith. Good works.
So we think of Luther today as being sort of emphasizing faith over good works, but initially Luther emphasized good works.
This point was that if you can pay a penance, it's going to prevent you from having to do genuine acts of love and service.
And that's what the church should be all about.
Now, very interestingly, Luther was made famous.
You know, here's this obscure monk in a rural part of Germany, Wittenberg at the time had a population maybe four to five thousand, so this was not exactly the center of Europe or of Christendom, but nevertheless, there was an influential group of scholars and intellectuals known as the humanists, and the humanists were church reformers.
These are people who had no intention of breaking up or leaving the church, but they wanted to fix what they saw as these horrible practices that were going on, pervasive forms of just shameful behavior and corruption.
I mean, you'd have these reformers go to Rome.
They would see, you know, Italian priests who had concubines on the side.
The church was, some of these people were all about the money.
All they were doing is trying to rack up cash so that they could build monuments and build cathedrals and so on.
So the reformers were about fixing the church.
And initially they thought, hey, here's Luther.
He's kind of one of us.
This Augustinian monk, he's come out of a monastery and he's making many of the same critiques that we are.
So they promoted Luther.
They reprinted his theses.
They publicized them.
Luther became famous all over Europe.
Wow.
And then this guy, as I say, who had been entombed in a monastery for much of his adult life suddenly becomes a, if you will, not just a national, but an international figure.
He's known from Amsterdam all the way to Bern.
And then Luther's early ideas, which were, by the way, forged in the monastery about his critiques, for example, of papal authority, they've become controversial.
Luther has... Something, a dispute, a debate called the Leipzig Disputation with a very talented opponent, a fellow named Johann Eck.
And Eck is a full match for Luther.
And in the debate, Eck pushes Luther.
In fact, he pushes him up against the wall.
Now later, Luther would thank Eck.
He would say, hey Eck, I wasn't really ready to say all these things.
I hadn't thought through the full implications of my position, but you, through the strength of your arguments, forced me to do that.
So what was Eck pushing Luther to do?
Well, Luther would say things like, well, it's wrong to emphasize indulgences.
And Eck would say, well, isn't that up to the Pope?
And Luther would say, no, it's not.
And Eck would say, well, if it's not up to the Pope, who is it up to?
Could it be up to, for example, the church councils?
Now, remember, by the church councils here, we mean powerful groups of early Christians meeting to decide upon central doctrines of the faith.
Think of the Council of Nicaea, which 325 AD, this was the council that decided the doctrine of the Trinity.
Where's the Trinity in the Bible?
Well, it isn't. You can't find it explicitly there.
But in Nicaea, the council decides that God is one person.
God is one. But God is also three.
And God is three and one at the same time.
So this comes out of Nicaea.
This is the church council. And so Eck is pushing Luther to say, well, if the Pope doesn't have the authority, what about the councils?
And Luther goes, yeah, I'm not sure they do either.
And then Eck goes, well, what about the church fathers?
What about the people who knew the apostles?
What about Jerome? What about Augustine?
The kind of towering figure of early Christendom.
And Luther was forced to say that they're probably wrong too.
That if they go beyond scripture, if they in any sense...
Articulate doctrines that cannot be found in Scripture.
These doctrines are wrong and they are heretical and they should be jettisoned.
So you see Luther here pushing toward a position we now identify him with, sola scriptura, which means only the Bible.
That all Christian truth must be located.
Remember in medieval Christianity, the idea was that truth emerges through a kind of interaction between the Bible, the text, and And the church.
And what Luther was doing, really, for the first time, was radically opposing the one to the other, opposing the Bible to the church, and saying, in effect, that no, the church doesn't get to authoritatively proclaim the Bible.
The Bible stands, in a sense, on its own, sola scriptura.
So, we see Luther here radicalizing and radicalizing toward a doctrine that really became central for him.
It's not the doctrine of sola scriptura.
It's rather the doctrine of sola fide.
The doctrine that, by and large, that if you want to reach heaven, if you want to have salvation, what you can do to make that happen is exactly nothing.
God has to do it all.
God has to do it for you.
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Martin Luther viewed his doctrine, Sola Fide, justification by faith alone, as the central doctrine of Christianity, a doctrine that he believed had been set aside, ignored, missed for the previous 1,500 years of Christianity.
In other words, Christendom prior to Luther, Luther felt, had moved away, had somehow rejected or polluted, compromised this central doctrine, the central truth that he, Luther, was discovering, a doctrine that was not about some peripheral practice like indulgences or some kind of waywardness that could be reformed by changing practices.
This went to the very heart of Christianity.
This was Luther's justification for basically saying that the entire church had been, in a sense, taken over, had been corrupted, had become in a sense the tool of the Antichrist.
Let's remember very critically that Luther's intention was never to, quote, start his own church.
He wasn't saying, this is the Roman Catholic truth of the matter, this is their Christianity, I'm going to sort of give you my Christianity.
Or this is their reading of the Bible, I'm going to give you my reading of the Bible.
No, for Luther, there's only one truth.
Truth can't be... Multiple?
This modern idea that everyone sort of reads the Bible, comes up with their own, this could not be further from Luther's view.
Luther's view is there is one truth, there is one church, there is one scripture, there is one meaning to it all, and we're fighting about what that is.
I am articulating the truth of Christianity.
Now, interestingly, Luther's idea...
Of sola fide, justification by faith, was not just a response to a kind of public problem.
It wasn't just that he thought, well, the church has got it wrong as a theologian.
I'm sort of figuring out this is the right path.
No. For Luther, this was a very personal kind of anguish.
When Luther was in the monastery, his struggle, his personal struggle, and he writes about this very passionately, was, how do I do the things I need to do to sort of live up to the kind of immeasurable holiness of God?
God's holiness is so great.
God is sort of so far up there, and I am so low down here, that how can I even get closer to my target, which is to sort of be worthy of, you may say, God's embrace.
Luther here is concerned with sin, but by sin, he doesn't mean this sin or that sin.
Oh, I was late to this, or oh, I missed Mass, or oh, I... No, he's concerned with capital S sin.
The sin, in a sense, that he thinks is part of, built into the human, if not into human nature.
And of course, Luther did believe in a corrupted human nature, a nature corrupted by the fall.
But he also believed in the idea that our disposition, our choices, are always to do it our way and not God's way.
Now, admittedly, The church in Luther's time, the Catholic Church, had a doctrine of atonement.
But Luther begins to think about this and he says, basically, it's nonsense.
How do you really atone for something?
Oh, I won't do it again.
So? You're not supposed to be doing it in the first place.
How does agreeing not to do it again atone for what you already did?
Oh, I killed someone, but I'm not going to kill anyone else.
That's not an atonement.
That's merely doing what you should be doing originally.
So for Luther, all of these forms of atonement are inadequate, to put it mildly.
And Luther looks at Christianity, and he basically says, first of all, the bar, the moral bar, was high enough in Judaism.
You know, when we think of the Old Testament and Judaism of the Ten Commandments, but of course the Jews didn't just live by the Ten Commandments.
They lived by, you could call it, the One Hundred Commandments.
The Ten Commandments are front and center, but the Jews had all kinds of other rules and rituals.
You had to do this, you had to do that.
It was very hard, in a sense, to be a faithful Jew in the Old Testament.
And then in the New Testament, Luther notes, the bar is raised even higher.
I'm going to read here. This is Matthew 548.
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
Wow, this is Jesus.
Not enough to be good.
Don't be better. Be ye perfect.
How, says Luther, how can I do that?
Here's Jesus. Love your enemies.
Do good to those who hate you.
Luther's like, what could be more unnatural than that?
How do we do good?
We don't just love our enemies.
We have to do good to them.
And we have to do good to people who hate us.
Here's Jesus. If you have contemplated the sin, thinking of adultery here, you have committed it.
And Luther goes, well, by that standard, who can be innocent?
How can it be that we can not only purify our actions, we also have to purify our minds?
So what Luther is really realizing, and this is his sort of central insight, is how can the wolf, us, human beings, become a lamb?
And in reading Romans, Paul's letter to the Romans, Luther arrives at the thunderbolt inside that...
Man cannot. There is no way.
And so the question then becomes, well, if there's no way, why are we constantly given these commandments?
Why would God, why would Jesus ask us to do things that we can't do?
And here Luther gives a kind of startling answer.
He goes, the point of setting the bar so high is not for anyone to jump it.
It is really for you to realize that you can't do it.
In other words, God's law is not there to be perfectly fulfilled.
It can't be. We can't do it.
It's there to show sinners that they can't fulfill it.
The impossibility of fulfilling God's law is intended to drive sinners to trust in Christ and in this way to find salvation.
In other words, we need to recognize by the fact that, wow...
I'm supposed to jump that high wall?
It's not going to happen.
I can't do it. God has to do it for me and through me.
In other words, I am a sinner.
I am a beggar.
I need to stretch my empty hands out for God to, in a sense, fill them.
For Luther, this is not some theological fine point, in fact.
It's like a wonderful chart of liberation because Luther realizes, listen, this anguish I had in the monastery, how do I jump?
How do I jump? I don't have to jump.
I've just got to realize I can't jump.
I'm human. I can't cross the chasm to God.
God has to cross it for me.
And so, God is the instrument of our salvation.
What can we do to help our salvation?
And Luther's answer is nothing.
Christianity is not a meritocracy.
So, for Luther, this doesn't mean that you don't do good works.
Luther's point is you should do good works.
But those good works are not going to count at all.
In getting you to heaven.
It's true that when you are transformed by faith, when you are transformed by God's grace, that will make you a better person.
And as an expression of that, you will want to do good works.
So good works in that sense are a sign that you are filled with the love of God, but they are not something that contributes, not even one iota to your salvation.
Salvation is completely a free gift given by God Ultimately, to whom he chooses.
And we're touching here upon something I'll pick up tomorrow, which is, who does God choose?
How do some people end up in heaven?
How do other people end up in hell?
This will become a little bit of a problem for Luther.
But at this point, Luther's articulating a doctrine, a doctrine that, by the way, I agree with completely, namely that our salvation is not the result of human effort.
It is a free gift given by the grace of God.
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