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Coming up, we're in Black History Month.
Do we need a Black History Month?
In any case, I'm going to proceed to provide you with a very relevant Black History lesson.
Trump is sort of unloading on DeSantis.
I'll offer my analysis of the strategy behind this.
I'll review the statement of Nancy Pelosi's daughter, which seems to kind of give the game away on January 6th.
And I'll explore a contemporary theological debate regarding the Apostle Paul and his letter to the Romans.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy. In a time of confusion, division, and lies, we need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
We are right in the middle here in February in Black History Month.
Well, I guess we're two-thirds of the way through Black History Month.
And it might be interesting to think about why we have Black History Month at all.
Now, I'm not saying that it's a bad idea per se, but what I'm saying is that it makes sense at a time when The issue of what blacks did in history was somehow being systematically excluded from the history profession.
If all they were teaching you about was history minus blacks, then you'd argue, wait a minute, if we can't reform the history department and have a more full or inclusive or balanced picture of history, we need to have a separate program called Black History Department.
Or even in the university, the analog for this would be Black Studies departments or Black Studies programs.
But we all know that today the truth is sort of, well, almost the opposite.
You've got so much focus on Black history that very often, not just whites, but other immigrant groups, other types of ethnic groups are downplayed or ignored.
People learn hardly anything about Hispanics.
They learn hardly anything about Asian Americans.
They learn hardly anything about American Indians.
So if you ask people, what do you know about American history, pretty much all they know is the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, and a few signposts along that way.
But they don't know anything else.
If you were to ask them things like, can you tell us who the key figures were of the modern industrial revolution in America, they'd be like, vacant look.
A few years ago, Morgan Freeman, the actor, was being interviewed by Mike Wallace.
And Mike Wallace said, I understand you're not too happy with Black History Month.
And Morgan Freeman answered it beautifully.
And the clip is, by the way, on social media.
You can look it up. Morgan Freeman says to Mike Wallace, Hey Mike, you know, you're Jewish.
What do you think of the idea of a Jewish History Month?
Do you like the idea? And Mike Wallace goes, oh, no.
And then Morgan Freeman goes, well, why not?
What's wrong with having Jewish History Month?
And of course, Mike Wallace, you can kind of belatedly gets the point.
He realizes, wait a minute, I want Jewish history to be part of history.
The Holocaust is not like a Jewish event.
It's an event in the history of the 20th century and a very important one.
So I want it to be taught in the mainstream history class that way.
But the moment that Mike Wallace admits that, he has to admit that there's something inherently problematic with the idea of giving Black history a month.
And so that's...
So I think Morgan Freeman gets very much the better of that exchange.
But look, we have Black History Month, so it is.
I want to talk about a lesson that will probably never be taught in Black History Month or never be taught the way I'm going to deliver it.
And that is, I want to revisit the famous debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois in the early part of the 20th century.
So this is a debate that occurred basically 100 years ago.
Between what were then the two greatest black men living.
Not the two greatest black men of all time, but the two greatest living black men at that time, a scholar named W.E.B. Du Bois, who was a northerner.
In fact, he was the first black to get his PhD at Harvard University.
He became a prominent professor, and he wrote important books, including The Souls of Black Folk.
At the other end was a Southerner, a Southern black guy, born a slave, Booker T. Washington, grew up to become the head of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, and became in his own way an extremely prominent figure.
in fact, got an honorary degree at Harvard, set up all kinds of philanthropic programs, very often with white philanthropic support in the South.
A major figure who wrote a classic work that I highly recommend to you, in fact, I think it's probably the single most important single work by a black American.
It's called Up From Slavery.
Even Frederick Douglass's great works, his three autobiographies, don't compare, in my view, in terms of force and relevance to Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery.
I read that book, by the way, when I was in India.
And it's interesting. I, you know, I'd never met, obviously, an African American.
I knew very little about American history.
And yet I found that book deeply interesting and very moving.
And Booker T. Washington became one of my heroes before, again, before I knew very much about the history of blacks in America.
Now, turns out that there was a debate and sometimes a little acrimonious, more acrimonious from Du Bois' side.
He was the guy who opened up this attack on Booker T. Washington.
Booker T. Washington, who was very influential at the time, did retaliate by blocking W.E.B. Du Bois from getting certain access to speaking engagements and being invited to certain conferences.
So it ended up being a two-way fight between these two prominent black men.
But when we come back in the next segment, I'll tell you what the fight is about because I think it has a pressing significance, even now in the 21st century.
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I want to talk here in Black History Month about the argument between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.
And I've spoken about this before on the podcast, so I'm going to make sure that I do this from a new angle.
And the angle I'm choosing for today is the mutual critiques We're good to go.
Segregationist. Or to put it differently, you have made your peace with segregation.
You've said segregation is alright.
And this makes you a bit of a traitor, a bit of a sellout, a bit of what today we would call an Uncle Tom.
So the first question is, was Booker T. Washington right?
He's referring to a famous speech that...
I'm sorry, it's Dubois right.
He's referring to a famous speech that Booker T. Washington gave...
In fact, this was in Atlanta, an Atlanta fair or conference, and Booker T. Washington said this,"...the wisest of my race understand that agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly,
and that progress and the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing." So what is Booker T. Washington saying?
Or B, even solve the problem.
What is the problem?
The problem, as Booker T. Washington saw it, is that blacks have been too degraded by their own experience of slavery and now segregation, so they don't have the skills to compete in modern industrial society.
So Booker T. Washington wasn't for segregation.
In fact, behind the scenes, he worked to dismantle it.
He funded lawsuits against it.
So, my view is that although Booker T. Washington's words can on the surface be taken as, quote, you know, tolerating segregation, it is unfair to portray him as pro-segregation.
Now, the second allegation of Du Bois was that Booker T. Washington opposed higher education.
He was merely for industrial education, manual education, and Education in becoming, let's say, a plumber or a carpenter or a farmer, but not in becoming, as Du Bois became, let's say, a university professor.
And again, I think this is a bit of a misreading of Booker T. Washington.
It's based on the fact that Booker T. Washington himself set up an industrial school where the focus, of course, was on industrial or manual education.
But Booker T. Washington's reason for that is that I'm dealing with people who are just a decade or so, two decades, three decades removed from slavery.
These are people who don't know how to brush their teeth.
They don't know how to show up on time.
They have none of the basic skills that are required for them to succeed in, at that time of course, the 20th century.
So Booker T. Washington's point is first, you begin by learning the basics.
And then you move on to higher forms of education.
So I think Booker T. Washington was not in any sense against higher education.
He just thought that before higher education, you need elementary and secondary education, and then you proceed step by step to higher education.
But now let's turn to Booker T. Washington's critique of Du Bois, which was basically that, listen, Du Bois, you've got to realize that we blacks need to develop a lot of skills.
Otherwise, we will be out-competed, not just by whites, but any other group that comes to America that has those skills, that has a family structure that's cohesive, that has work habits, that has good habits of savings and frugality.
Those are the people who are going to get ahead even when everybody has the same rights.
Now, it's interesting how Dubois responds to this because he goes, yeah.
He says, listen...
If blacks, if they accuse Negro women of lewdness, what are they doing but advertising to the world the shameless lewdness of those Southern men who brought millions of mulattoes into the world?
Suppose today Negroes do steal.
Who was it that for centuries made stealing a virtue by stealing their labor?
So Du Bois is making the correct point that if blacks are a certain way, it is their own history, their degradation at the hands of whites through slavery that made them that way.
And Booker T. Washington's point in response is, yeah, so?
It may be that your environmental conditions made you that way, but now, in a condition where rights are improving, where we're getting more rights, and even when we get equal rights, we're going to need to be able to take advantage of those rights.
So... So, here's Booker T. Washington.
We should let the world understand that we are not going to hide crime simply because it is committed by black people.
Notice, for example, today how the media tries to hide crime if and when it's committed by blacks.
You know, they just talk about, a man did this, a man did that.
But, of course, if it's a white guy, a white guy did this.
A quick effort to try to blame something on white supremacy.
So where does this leave us?
I think it leaves us with the fact that the Dubois agenda, which was called, can be summarized as agitate, agitate, agitate, was needed by blacks to secure equal rights.
But the Booker T. Washington agenda, which can be summarized as self-improvement, self-help, or just work, work, work, is what is needed not just by blacks, but any group that is trying to climb up the ladder, that's what those groups most urgently need now.
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Ronald Reagan sometimes spoke of what he called the 11th Commandment.
And he meant this somewhat wryly or perhaps humorously.
But he also was kind of serious about it.
And Reagan's 11th Commandment was, Thou shall not attack a fellow Republican.
Now, this is...
You can see that this commandment is somewhat obsolete today.
People attack each other on the right all the time.
This guy is a rhino.
This guy is an establishment guy.
We can't be on his side.
And conversely, from the establishment, you have the attack.
These people are MAGA extremists.
These people are on the far right.
The Republican Party needs to be a mainstream party to appeal to the middle.
And so you've got a fair amount of mutual accusation and recriminations going on.
And that is now being seen at the level of the presidential candidates.
We saw it, by the way, it's not that this is happening for the first time, but we're seeing, for example, we have now only two declared candidates, Trump and Nikki Haley, but of course there is another looming candidate, DeSantis, and Trump has been pretty ferociously attacking DeSantis.
Attacking DeSantis, both in terms of DeSantis being an establishment guy.
I don't know if Trump has explicitly used the term rhino, but he has definitely said that DeSantis is associating with people like Paul Ryan and others that I think many Republicans on the MAGA camp would consider to be rhinos.
And then Trump, in his Trumpian fashion, has come up with a name for DeSantis.
He calls him DeSanctimonious, which I think Which I think is supposed to imply that DeSantis is kind of pompous, you know, and thinks he's like above the fray.
He doesn't need to respond.
He's like, he's reached a level of, you know, Himalayan rectitude as a result of winning his last election by 19 points.
And so you've got this sort of attack, but it's a one way attack.
Because DeSantis is maintaining kind of a prudent silence.
He's been asked once or twice about it.
And what he's basically said is, listen, I just got re-elected.
I recognize that this is really how some people do it, but I'm not doing it that way.
And DeSantis has in no way even implied like an intense interest, even though many people say his actions show that he is mobilizing in order to run.
I think Trump certainly does expect him to run.
But... I want to urge a course of action here that I think makes a distinction.
And that is, I think it is better for Republicans to recognize that, look, American politics is fought in teams.
And whatever happens in the primary, we do have to come together as a party for the general election.
And our real enemies are on the other side.
And I use the word enemy a little cautiously because I'm not talking about just our political opponents or people who disagree, but people who want to undermine our America and produce an America not just different but very hostile.
We're going to need all the troops that we can summon politically in order to fight these guys.
And so a good rule of thumb I suggest for the primaries is only to have criticisms among Republicans that focus on policy and principle and not to have personal attacks.
And this would apply all the way around the bend.
In other words, I'm not giving advice only to Trump or to Haley or to DeSantis because we'll eventually end up with, I think, quite a few candidates.
We might end up with, I don't know if we'll end up with 15 like we did in 2016, but we might end up with five, six.
It's pretty clear Pompeo may get in.
Other people might get in.
There are people clearly testing the waters.
And so, a good rule, I think, going forward is, listen, don't be hesitant to say where you disagree with the other guy.
This person is wrong on this or that policy.
But there's no reason to call each other names.
Why? Because ultimately, we are fighting on the same team.
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There are two rival narratives about January 6th.
And these narratives are so different that you not only have to scratch your head and ask, how could two such opposite accounts have developed, but how are they so energetically sustained by the two sides when only one of them can be correct?
The issue, of course, is whether January 6th was really an insurrection, yes or no.
As you know, I don't think it was.
I have ridiculed the idea that it is.
I think I'm in that sense in the Republican mainstream.
But the rival narrative is that look for yourself.
Look at all the fellows trying to break into the Capitol, smashing glass.
Look at the skirmishes between the police and the protesters.
It was very definitely an insurrection.
And again, this view is doggedly maintained.
It is consistently upheld by the mainstream media.
Every Democrat is singing out of this choir book.
So, who's right?
How do you arbitrate between these two narratives?
Well, one clue...
Is you look to see what the other side says privately.
So it'd be interesting if privately people had, let's say, access to Debbie and my conversations, and privately we said things like, oh, you know, it really was an insurrection, Debbie.
Of course, we can't say that on the podcast.
So if somebody could get a recording of me saying that, then it would show that I know it was an insurrection, but I'm just publicly denying it because, of course, I'm not an honest person.
But conversely, if we can get video showing that the other side privately admits that it wasn't an insurrection, that would be very telling, wouldn't it?
And as it turns out, we do have that video.
And who is it from? It's from Nancy Pelosi's daughter.
Nancy Pelosi's daughter, Alexandra Pelosi, was making a documentary.
Now, it's very interesting because, first of all, she seems to have known that January 6th would be a huge deal.
She had a film crew.
She was filming Nancy Pelosi, her mom, even before the events of January 6th.
And all of this by itself raises the question, how was she so sure that this would become some kind of historic day?
Now, more importantly, she did interviews with some of the January 6th defendants.
This was subsequently, obviously, after these guys were...
We're being called out, and she ingratiated herself with them, and she said, I want to record you, and some of them agreed to interviews.
But one of these defendants said, listen, I don't mind being interviewed by you, but I'm also going to record what you say.
Is that okay? And she said, sure, you can do that.
And so the recording I'm now referring to is provided by a January 6th defendant who recorded Pelosi.
So Pelosi is on video and the recording has been affirmed both by the person who took it and by this person's lawyer as authentic.
And what you see in it is that Alexandra Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's daughter, is very clear that this was not an insurrection.
This was not an attempt to overthrow the government.
In fact, she herself not only ridicules that idea, but minimizes or basically goes, what these people are doing is nothing.
It's no big deal.
And all of this is from Nancy Pelosi's own daughter coming out of her own mouth and in her own voice.
Now, the video itself is somewhat long and I don't wanna go through the entire transcript.
I'm just going to read some of the lines.
These are lines out of Alexandra Pelosi's mouth.
She's talking about the shaman guy.
And here's what she says.
The shaman did nothing.
What did the shaman do?
He stood there. So, in other words, what kind of insurrectionist is just standing there, basically doing nothing, making no effort to take over the government?
Here's Nancy Pelosi continuing.
Are the Proud Boys white supremacists?
She goes, I'm friends with Gavin McGinnis, the founder of the Proud Boys.
When someone talks about the Proud Boys, they say, well, white supremacists.
She laughs as a, ha ha ha, what a ridiculous concept.
She then says to the January 6 defendant, you're going to be able to laugh about this one day.
And then she goes on to say, if there was an insurrection, you were supposed to have a plan.
This was the sorriest insurrection in history.
Honey, this is exactly what you say.
If this was an insurrection, it's the most incompetently planned...
Poorly executed insurrection ever.
And Nancy Pelosi's daughter knows that.
So she's laughing it off, meaning this is not a serious insurrection.
People may be saying, this is 1776 all over again.
But they mean that metaphorically.
They're not taking any steps to blow up the Capitol, to sort of forcibly seize the Capitol with force of arms.
None of that. She continues to say...
D.C. is a lot of people who work for the government.
I don't think they're sympathetic. If you got it moved, meaning the trial, you totally get off.
So here is Nancy Pelosi's daughter admitting that the D.C. juries are biased, that they are basically government operatives of one sort or the other because they all are feeding off the government trough.
You can't really get a fair trial in D.C., And then she goes on to say, if Democrats after Democrats lose the House, they get rid of the committee, people may lose, I think, lose interest.
No one's going to care when the Democrats are out of power.
You take Biden out of office, then who cares?
What she's saying is that this is all just a hoopla.
created by the Democrats because they have the power to do it.
And at the moment they're out of power, the issue itself loses its significance.
Why? Because it's a propaganda issue that is being exploited by the left while it can.
But it's a propaganda issue that bears very little resemblance as she herself privately realizes to the truth.
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We're seeing very interesting cases of Chinese intrusion into the United States.
And by themselves, these cases of intrusion, we're gonna talk not so much about balloons, although that of course is one form of intrusion, balloons that are used for surveillance purposes.
I'm going to be talking about Chinese police stations in America, operated or answerable to, set up by the Chinese political apparatus, in fact, by the Chinese Communist Party itself.
Now, before I talk about the police stations, it's worth noting that the United States has nothing equivalent in China.
There's been no case, as far as I know, of the United States sending surveillance balloons over Chinese territory.
There's no case where the United States has said, well, you know, we have companies that do business in China.
Why don't we set up some American police stations inside of China?
Nothing of the sort.
The Chinese would probably never allow it.
And yet we have these Chinese police stations now in America.
And apparently there are about a hundred of them and they're scattered all over the country, particularly, of course, in cities.
There's a number of them in New York.
There are some in San Francisco, in Los Angeles.
So particularly places where there's a significant Chinese population.
Now the FBI evidently raided one of these police stations.
This is a police station in New York, in Chinatown, and they have shut it down.
They've closed it. I don't know if they've closed it permanently or not.
The news reports are a little unclear about that.
But apparently there were a couple of reports by a non-profit organization called Safeguard Defenders.
And this organization pointed out that these Chinese police stations are there to maintain a kind of surveillance of the Chinese American community.
And also of Chinese students and Chinese nationals who are in America.
So the Chinese police station is kind of an overseas monitoring system for these Chinese.
And it not only is used as a propaganda vehicle, but to suppress dissent in the Chinese community.
If there are Chinese who don't like the actions of the Chinese government, then the Chinese police station can crack down on them.
In extreme cases, there have even been reports, not in America that I'm aware of, but I think?
Now, the Chinese say that these police stations are harmless.
They go, they're not even really police stations.
They're sort of networking centers.
And they say that we have these to help people who are from China who don't know their way in a new country.
They don't know how to get around.
They don't know how to get a driver's license, how to renew a driver's license, where they should go to get their proper visas.
So we assist in those things.
Obviously, if that is all necessary, We're good to go.
In Ireland, in Canada, in Holland, that these Chinese police stations are exercising a kind of nefarious presence, which means they are extensions of the Chinese government, and they are used to...
Not only ensure conformity of Chinese people to the line of the Chinese government, but as almost launching pads to project Chinese influence in other countries, in particularly European countries and in America.
Now, why is this bad?
It's bad for a couple of reasons.
First of all, it could imply that the Chinese who are in America do not have their full rights.
Their rights are being violated by these Chinese police stations.
They're being violated really by a foreign government.
And that, of course, raises also the simple issue of sovereignty.
A country, by and large, has every right to control what happens within its own borders.
And the idea of a foreign power, let alone a hostile power, having some kind of presence in our country, in America, and exercising a kind of jurisdiction, however informally, is utterly unacceptable.
So this is a case where I think the FBI is right to be concerned.
And is right to take action.
Now, the action the FBI has taken to date seems to be very limited.
Out of 100 Chinese police stations, they have raided, as far as we can tell, exactly one.
This is the one in Chinatown that has subsequently been closed.
I don't know if the FBI has kind of an ongoing investigation of all these police stations and if their singular raid on the one institution in Chinatown is a prelude to them doing this to others.
there are a bunch of these Chinese police stations in New York itself, and they haven't gone after the other ones. So are they saying that this one police station is more egregious, it's done stuff that we don't find in the other police stations, or is the FBI just going one by one and starting here with this Chinese police station in Chinatown? Either way, I think it's important for the United States to affirm its own sovereignty, to put the Chinese government on notice that hands-off
Don't interfere with our airspace.
Don't interfere with our elections.
Don't interfere with the way that we communicate with people who are, or the laws under which people are living under America, whether they be American citizens or foreign nationals, who are also, of course, obliged to follow American laws.
So this is a case where the FBI, perhaps belatedly, but nevertheless, it's overdue that the FBI has stepped in and Done something right for a change.
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I'm going to take a little bit of a detour, a side journey, away from the normal what's so great about Christianity apologetic segment that I do at the end of each podcast. I'm going to do something a little more in-depth today that goes to the heart of a big question that was well central to the Reformation but also a question that people think about today. What is the
relationship between faith and works?
In terms of our salvation.
Is salvation by faith?
Is it by works?
Is it by faith plus works?
This is something that has been debated now for almost, well, almost five centuries, I guess, within the Christian orbit.
But it's a question that in some ways goes back to the Bible itself and to the Old and New Testament.
Let's remember, for example, that in the Old Jewish Code, there were elaborate sets of works, which is to say codes and commandments, not just the Ten Commandments, but a sort of more detailed list of commandments.
I don't even know what the number is, but it's a big number.
There are several hundred commandments that even today Orthodox Jews will follow.
Now, of course, Christianity was a new order, a new dispensation, but I don't think anyone would say that in the Christian life, works are unimportant.
Many times in the New Testament, it talks about doing good works, feeding the hungry, helping the widow and the orphan.
In other words, doing acts of love and charity.
And so the importance of works is really not at issue here.
Now, I want to look at this issue of faith and works in the context of a debate that's emerged in recent years between two very prominent theologians.
They're both Protestant theologians, and the debate is, in theory, within the orbit of Protestantism.
However, it has interesting Catholic implications.
So whatever your denomination, I mean I'm assuming in this case that you're looking at this from a Christian point of view, you'll find yourself in this debate.
Now let me introduce the two protagonists.
You might be familiar with John Piper.
He is a Reformed theologian in the Midwest.
He's written many, many books on justification, justification of course by faith alone, and he is a strong, you would say, affirmer of the central principles of both Luther and Calvin, which is that we earn our salvation exclusively through faith.
And in fact, even the term we earn our salvation is misleading because Piper wouldn't put it that way.
In fact, what he would say, again echoing Luther and Calvin, that salvation is a free gift.
He wouldn't say it at all, but what gives us sort of entree to salvation is believing, is having faith, is affirming that Christ's substitutionary atonement was sufficient to pay the price of our sins.
And by doing that, we put ourselves into the so-called beloved community, and we become part of, we become, in a sense, a Christ follower.
Now, N.T. Wright is Well, he's a research professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of St.
Andrews. He was for a long time the Bishop of Durham, England.
So he's an Anglican.
And he is also perhaps one of the leading two or three New Testament scholars alive today.
Well, N.T. Wright has done a massive study of the life and work of Paul, the Apostle Paul.
And he's the one who has kicked off this debate by offering a radically...
But certainly from the point of view of Reformation theology, a challenging view of Paul, and particularly of a passage that was very central to Luther, which is Paul's letter to the Romans.
So let me start with Luther.
Luther was an Augustinian monk, and he was a very serious, a very rigorous guy.
He was not one of those monks who had, you know, a mistress or was basically doing all kinds of stuff on the side, not at all.
In fact, he was trying to purify his life to be kind of worthy of salvation, and yet he was very conscious of the huge chasm, the huge distance between himself and God.
And Luther's understanding of the Bible was transformed when he read Paul's letter to the Romans, in which Paul talks about the fact that we have salvation through faith.
We have salvation through faith in Christ, that Christ has inaugurated a new order.
And for Luther, this came as a kind of epiphany because Luther realized, wait a minute, I don't have to try to climb this sort of tall ladder of good works to salvation.
Why? Because that work has been done for me.
Christ did it already. So, faith is really what is needed and faith is sufficient.
This is the key point.
Not just that faith is needed, no one really denied that, but rather that faith is all you need.
You don't need anything else.
True, good works can then become a manifestation of the new person you become through faith.
But the good works itself do no work.
The good works don't get you anywhere.
Faith is what delivers you.
And Paul said, and Luther got this view from Paul.
Paul is the one who, in a sense, opened Luther's eyes.
But now we come to N.T. Wright and his study of Paul.
And N.T. Wright says basically, he doesn't put it this frankly, but I'm going to put it frankly.
He says basically that Luther was sort of wrong.
Luther misread Paul.
And think of the implications of what he's saying, because if N.T. Wright is right, if he's right...
Then what he's saying is that the whole Lutheran theology, the whole idea that Luther got out of Paul, that faith alone is all that's needed and nothing more is needed whatsoever, that idea is also wrong.
It's also wrong because that's not what Paul was talking about at all.
Essentially what N.T. Wright is arguing is that Paul was taking part in a completely different debate.
A debate not between faith and works, but as we'll see in the next segment, a debate between the old Jewish code, which Paul calls works, and being a new person in Christ in which you don't have to follow those Jewish rules anymore.
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I'm talking about the debate between the Anglican theologian N.T. Wright and the Reformed theologian John Piper.
Now, John Piper affirms a traditional Reformation theology.
In fact, this is the theology that's taught in pretty much every evangelical, and really beyond that, in Lutheran and Methodist and Episcopal pulpits around the country, namely, that salvation is by faith alone.
And John Piper gets this from the same place that Luther got it, from the text of Romans, where Paul says this.
Paul says that salvation is by faith in Jesus Christ.
And so this appears to be a statement of the obvious.
In fact, it seems almost incomprehensible that Catholics got into a fight over this because don't Catholics agree that we are saved through faith?
So it seemed that the Protestant Reformation claim here is inarguable.
But N.T. Wright comes along with this massive study of the Apostle Paul, and he says, look, it's not that it isn't there in the text, but what you're missing is the context.
That when you look at the context, it's very clear that Paul is not talking about, hey, Christian, should you have faith or should you do good works?
That's not the debate going on at all.
Paul, in fact, is considering a different kind of debate.
So let's look at what that debate is.
That debate goes back to the old Abrahamic covenant.
So God makes a covenant with the Jews.
And with the Jews alone.
And in the Old Testament, God says to the Jews that we've got this sort of deal.
And by having this covenant, you become part of my orbit.
You're part of my sovereignty, if you will.
You are under Yahweh.
And how do we know that you're under Yahweh?
Well, we know because you're going to follow these codes and rules and commandments that I'm going to give you that are going to be enumerated in your holy books.
And so following the holy books, it's not as if following the holy books gets you to salvation.
It's that by following the holy books, you are demonstrating, you are providing a sign that you are one of the chosen people.
You are part of We're good to go.
Paul did write to the Jews.
The letter to the Hebrews is written to Jews who have now accepted Christ.
And those were Jews who were living in the old Jewish way.
They were circumcised.
They were following Jewish diet.
And yet they proclaimed Christ as the Messiah.
That was the original Jewish community in Jerusalem, for example.
But Christian communities began to spring up in places like Corinth, which is now, of course, in Greece.
Galatia, which I believe is now in modern Turkey.
And Rome.
And so Paul's letters to the Galatians, to the Corinthians, to the Romans, these are letters to Christians.
And what are these Christians worried about?
They're worried about the fact that the Jews are saying that you can't be a Christian without following the Jewish codes and commandments.
The Jews are saying, we're the chosen people.
If you want to join us by proclaiming the Messiah, well, you've got to do what we do.
You've got to be circumcised.
You've got to follow these diets and codes and commandments.
And so this is what the Christians are wrestling with.
And Paul is coming in with a kind of radical answer.
No, you don't. You don't have to follow.
Now, Paul is nowhere saying you don't have to follow the Ten Commandments.
Of course not. But what he is saying is you don't have to follow the wide set of rules that Jews follow, that Orthodox Jews, for example, follow today.
Christians don't follow those rules.
And Paul set the precedent for this by basically saying, no, there's a new rule.
And the new rule, by and large, is that we now put ourselves under the lordship of Jesus Christ, and the old system is, in a sense, obsolete.
So even Jews, who proclaim Christ as the Messiah, they can.
There's nothing preventing them from.
But they don't have to.
Follow the old codes and commandments.
Everybody is under the new dispensation.
And another way to put it is that spiritually, I mean historically Jews remain the chosen people, but historically the chosen people are now all those who in a sense gain their chosenness by becoming a member of Christ's new community.
So, What does this mean?
What this really means is that N.T. Wright is saying that Paul is having a debate, resolving a debate, taking sides in a debate, but it's a different debate.
The Pauline debate is over the old Jewish laws versus the new dispensation in Christ, having faith in Christ.
Paul is not having a debate as the Reformation theologians thought he was.
Luther thought Paul was considering that for Christians, is it more important to do good works or is it more important to have faith?
And N.T. Wright is saying, no, that's not what Paul was debating at all.
The dividing line for Paul was between the Jewish laws and Not just following laws at all or not just doing good works at all, but following those particular rules and laws or being under the new dispensation of Christ.
Now, N.T. Wright goes on to say, I'm not questioning the fact that faith is an indispensable requirement for salvation.
I'm not dispensing with the fact that the...
I'm not disputing so-called sola scriptura.
What's sola scriptura?
That we get our understanding of theology from the Bible alone.
In fact, N.T. Wright is saying what I'm kind of saying is that Luther and Calvin sort of got the Bible wrong.
Now, N.T. Wright is very reluctant, understandably, to criticize either Luther or Calvin.
He tends to criticize modern Reformation, Reformed thinkers who are in the Luther and Calvin tradition.
So, I want to emphasize that what I've done here in giving, admittedly, a kind of abbreviated window into this debate is not only give a somewhat crude summary, but also overstate, for the point of clarity, what I think is the core issue between John Piper and N.T.
And I think that it's where I come out on these things is I find these very illuminating ways to think in a fresh way about old questions.
I'm not really taking sides in this debate.
I just want you to be aware of the debate because I think it helps to deepen our spiritual understanding.
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