It is a great tragedy that the Notre Dame cathedral burned yesterday. But what is it about that church, and those like it, that we find so awe inspiring? And why don’t we build churches of that sort anymore? Today I want to talk about the need for beauty in the church, and why we should start building beautiful churches again. Also, I’m going to defend someone I don’t usually defend. And I’ll answer your emails, including one about the rapture. Date: 04-16-2019
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Today on the Matt Wall Show, it is a great tragedy that the Notre Dame Cathedral burned yesterday, but what is it about the church, about that church, and those churches that are like it, that we find so awe-inspiring?
You know, why do we get so attached to those kinds of churches?
And why don't we build churches like that anymore?
Today I want to talk about the need for beauty in the church, and why we should start building beautiful churches again.
Also, today I'm going to defend someone I don't usually defend, and I'll answer your emails, including an email about the Rapture.
Is it upon us?
Is it even actually a thing?
We'll talk about that today on the Matt Wall Show.
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Notre Dame Cathedral, as you no doubt heard, was on fire yesterday in Paris.
The first day of Holy Week, a day after Palm Sunday, and this happens.
It's a building that went under construction almost 900 years ago.
It took well over 100 years to construct, not counting all the renovations throughout the centuries.
So this is just, I mean, you look at the man hours that went into this, including the renovations, and it's just, you know, it's really, Beyond comprehension, it is and still is one of the greatest churches ever to be built in the world, anywhere in the world, in history.
And the sad fact is that a sizable chunk of it is gone forever now because of what appears to be an accidental fire, probably related to some of the construction that was being done to fix, to renovate, you know, some of the things with the church.
A sizable chunk of it is gone, but not all.
And miraculously, and I do mean that literally, the bones are still standing.
Many of the magnificent stained glass windows are still intact.
The two main towers of the church are still there.
So, it's going to be hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars to repair slash rebuild, but it hasn't been reduced to ash.
It's still there, which is a testament to many things, including the architectural prowess of the Middle Ages.
What building today could withstand, could survive an inferno like that?
Not many of them, I'll tell you that.
But ultimately, it's a testament to God, of course.
But here's what I want to dwell on for a moment.
People, if you watch yesterday, and I was watching, I don't watch cable news a lot these days, but for something like this, I turned it on, I was watching the coverage.
And by the way, I'll give credit where it's due, I thought CNN did a great job of covering the fire.
Cuomo, whatever time he's on, I turned on CNN at whatever time, I think it was 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock, and he did his whole show on the cathedral burning, and I actually watched the entire thing.
I thought he just did a really wonderful job.
Don't usually give credit to CNN, I'll give them credit there.
But if you're watching the footage, you see people crying in the streets, they're distraught over it.
Well, why is that?
Well, I would say because the cathedral is beautiful, right?
And when something beautiful is made and then destroyed, we recognize it as a real loss.
Nobody would cry if they demolished the parking garage down the street, right?
But they do cry over this.
Because one is beautiful and one is not.
And beauty is important.
It's not a small thing.
You need beauty in faith and you need it in life.
Because beauty speaks to the fundamental longing of the human soul, and churches should strive always to satisfy that longing.
Not just with the building, obviously.
It's more than the building, but the building is part of it.
The building should be part of it.
Every aspect of the church experience, including the building itself, should be a part of this effort to point people towards God, to speak to that, To that longing that we have for beauty.
You know, I've told the story before about when my wife and I once walked into a mall in Kentucky, only to realize that it was not a mall because it was actually a megachurch.
I think I told the story on Ben's on the Sunday special.
The building looked in every way like a mall.
And when I wrote this today, there are people say, well, how could you have possibly made that mistake?
I'm telling you, the building looked exactly like a mall.
I mean, I would defy you if you looked at this building, I would defy and you didn't know what it was.
I would defy you to think anything other than mall.
I mean, it looked 100% like a mall.
And there was from what we could see, there was nothing on the building.
There was no religious paraphernalia.
We didn't even see anything that said the word church on it.
Obviously, we saw that, that we would have figured it out.
So, it looked like a mall, and we walked in.
And once inside the structure, we began to realize our mistake.
But it only really fully dawned on me when a woman in a neon green t-shirt walked up to us and handed us a program.
And then we realized, oh, okay, now I see what's going on here.
And then I found out later that this church was built right where a mall once stood.
I mean, it used to be a mall, actually, literally, which is, I guess, is part of the confusion for us because it was obviously in a mall-like area with restaurants and stuff all around and a big parking lot and people were walking in and out and just looked like a mall.
But it wasn't.
I thought about that incident yesterday as I watched the Notre Dame Cathedral burn.
Because nobody would ever make that mistake with the Notre Dame Cathedral or a building like it.
You look at that building and you know why it's there.
It is there to, it's constructed to worship and glorify God and to help in the facilitation of that worship.
To even look at the building is to, even now, after the fire, to look at it is to have a religious experience, because its beauty brings your mind unwittingly to higher things.
You can't help but think of God when you look at that building.
It focuses your sights upward, both physically and spiritually, because it is beautiful, and that's what beautiful things do.
Now, not every church can look like that.
I know that.
And maybe no church ever again will.
Even Notre Dame may never again look exactly like that, and that's just terrible to think about.
But churches are still being built in this country.
And lots of money is being spent on building them.
So this excuse that I hear from people that, well, we want to spend the money on helping the poor instead.
Oh, please, stop it.
You know, just stop it.
That mega church that I walked into, I guarantee that thing costs millions of dollars to build.
Millions.
Any church costs money to build.
And a lot of modern churches are very, very, very expensive.
Mega churches are very expensive, okay?
So it's not like they say, well, you know, we're going to tamp down the beauty so we can spend the rest on the poor.
No, that's not what they're doing, okay?
They're tamping down the beauty because they don't want it, and they also want to spend more on fancy light displays and audio-visual stuff and all that kind of stuff.
So it's not like we stop making beautiful churches to cut costs and give it to the poor.
And even if that was the excuse, even if that was true, I would still disagree with it.
And Jesus disagreed with it too.
He rebuked that attitude.
Remember when the woman was anointing Jesus with the expensive oils and perfumes?
And Judas is the one who said, well, we could sell that stuff and give it to the poor.
We should be doing that instead.
And Jesus rebuked Judas and said, you're always going to have the poor with you.
The point there is to spend money, yes, and energy and time on glorifying God is a good thing.
It's a false choice anyway.
You don't have to choose between glorifying God, and beauty, and art, and all of that, and helping the poor.
You can do both.
And in fact, you do help the poor with beauty.
The poor are people too.
And I'm talking about this is... Beauty is a fundamental human need.
That everyone, no matter what your socioeconomic status is, shares that need.
But we don't even have that excuse, because we are investing money in our churches, into the buildings, and they could be made beautiful.
Not Notre Dame Cathedral level beautiful, yes, but beautiful, yet they are not.
And it's not that we're nowadays, you know, trying to make beautiful churches and failing.
Okay, that would be maybe one thing, because it's the thought that counts, I guess.
What makes it so insidious is that we're trying really hard to make unbeautiful, bland, ugly, profane churches, and we're succeeding.
Our houses of worship look like shopping malls and prisons and basketball stadiums on purpose.
That's an aesthetic choice that's being made.
So whereas Notre Dame stands out gloriously amid the skyline, modern churches are meant to sort of blend in like chameleons.
Or like the, you know, the shy kid at the homecoming dance who's kind of trying to blend into the surroundings so no one looks at him.
And that's what churches do.
When you look at modern churches, it's like they're embarrassed to be a church.
They don't want anyone to know.
Even the names of the churches, you know, Crosspoint or New Horizons or something.
Do you know why they choose names like that?
Because they don't want you to know at first glance that it's a church.
They're ashamed of it.
And so you see a church these days, you see what it looks like, it has a name like New Horizons, and you think, well, what is that?
Is that a rehab center for wealthy drug offenders?
What is it?
And even if you went inside and listened to the sermon that's being delivered, you still probably wouldn't know.
You still wouldn't be exactly sure.
Maybe this is the motivational speech they give during rec time or something.
And that's the way the modern church experience is designed.
You know, the church that I attended as a child at the time was newly built, and it was really fascinating to look at this church, which you can still go and look at it, it still stands, because it seemed like it was made in order to maximize ugliness to the greatest possible degree.
Now, old Catholic churches, the way they were built was, if you go into a really old church, you'll notice this, old Catholic church, is that they were all built so that everybody in the church, including the priest, is faced to the tabernacle and the cross.
Everybody is faced that direction.
Like, we're all looking to Jesus.
We're not looking at each other, we're not looking at the guy up there, because it's not about him.
We're all looking up, you know, beyond, really.
And that's how churches were designed back in the Back in the old days.
But a change was made in the design of churches and Catholic churches, all churches, where now it's all about the guy on stage.
It's all about him and we're all everything is about glorifying him and the band and it's all about that.
So this church, you know, back in when I was a kid.
The way it was designed was they had put the tabernacle off to the side, there was very little artwork, no stained glass or anything, and it was centered so that everything was directed right at the priest, and then behind him was this absolutely hideous Decorative organ structure like for it's you know like a like a church organ the the pipes of the organ but they weren't even functional they're just decorative and that's what was the the focal point of the um of the experience it's like if you if you turn on
Joel Osteen sometime, which I don't recommend.
And what does he have up there on stage with him?
Is it like a tree or something like that?
Or a globe, right?
Just like some mundane, secular, kind of vague, ambiguous thing.
That's the focus.
That's what we're all looking at.
God forbid you have a cross up there, right?
We wouldn't want that.
Now, I have no problem with simple churches.
I'm not saying that all churches should be extravagant.
Far from it.
I really like the unassuming little old church houses that you find when you travel.
I do a lot of driving across Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Hampshire, and if you go around there, up and down the eastern, you know, east coast, You're going to find a lot of these little old church houses that were built probably 100, 200 years ago.
Very simple, very unassuming, but beautiful.
And they're the kind where you walk in, there's no air conditioning, the pews are super uncomfortable, there's no cry room for the fussy child, there's no bells and whistles at all.
Sometimes you'd be lucky if you even get a, usually you'll get a sound system, but that's pretty much it as far as modern additions go.
And I like those churches because there's a real unmistakable charm there and a feeling of connection to the past and to your own Christian history that you feel and you experience that you'll never experience in the comfortable temperature-controlled confines of Elevation Church or Lakewood or one of their cousins.
So, what I'm saying is, simple does not equate to ugly.
Mountains are simple.
Oak trees are simple.
Infants are simple.
Tiny colonial era churches are simple.
They're all simple in different ways, and they're beautiful in different ways.
Modern churches are not simple, and they're not cheap.
But all the money and care and complexity is devoted to keeping the hearts and minds of the congregation pointed towards earthly things.
And especially, as I said, towards the guy up on the pulpit, or the stage, I guess, delivering his vaguely theological opinions.
And that's what it's really—that's why everyone is there, to listen to the guy's opinions.
And the band, also.
Because, well, he wouldn't want any of the pesky artwork or beauty distracting from the solemn business of listening to him ramble on.
And that's the worst part about the modern trend of intentionally making our churches ugly.
is that it cloaks itself in this guise of self-abdicating humility when really it's exactly the opposite.
Michelangelo showed humility when he spent four years on his back painting the story of the Bible on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Now that's humility.
Modern churches show extraordinary self-conceit and arrogance when they expend their energy building elaborate but hideous sets for their band and their pastor to occupy.
That's not humility.
Why is it?
If one of these modernist behemoth churches were to burn to the ground, as long as nobody was inside the building, there aren't going to be any weeping throngs out in the street mourning it.
No one's really going to care.
The insurance companies will handle it, and a few days later, no one's going to even remember what that big, dumb, ugly thing even looked like.
People wept over Notre Dame.
Because of the beauty.
They wept over it for the same reason that a patriotic American would weep if, you know, I say as a Baltimore native, Fort McHenry, the fortress where the star-spangled banners were waving, that inspired the national anthem that Francis Scott Key wrote during the War of 1812 as he looked at Fort McHenry and the flags waving there.
If Fort McHenry, which still stands on the harbor in Baltimore, if that burned to the ground, you know, as a patriot and a Baltimore native, I would probably cry over that.
I would be really upset.
Why is it?
Not because I idolize the structure, but because I revere what it represents and what its presence and its history brings to mind.
And that's why the beauty of a church is so important.
And that's why the ugliness of modern churches is such a tragedy.
And it's why I really hope that the events of this week and what happened in Notre Dame might inspire us to once again reach for the artistic heights that our ancestors sought and attained.
Now, I want to head a few things off at the pass here, because I wrote I wrote a piece on this subject, and so for the last few hours, especially while I was on the plane, because I didn't have anything better to do, honestly, I've been fielding responses from Christians who really appear to be arguing for ugliness.
Like, they're arguing in principle for ugliness.
So my radical suggestion that we should make beautiful churches, there are a lot of Christians who are against it.
They say, no, I don't want beautiful churches.
That's a terrible thing.
I have no interest in that.
It's such a perverse mindset.
I cannot comprehend it.
It's really amazing.
And there are objections that I've seen.
There are a few objections.
First of all, A few that I've already covered.
They say, well, we don't want beautiful churches because we're spending the money elsewhere.
That's bogus.
I'm sorry.
That's not true.
It's not a valid objection because the ugly churches I'm targeting cost money.
All churches cost money.
If you're going to have a place to congregate, it's going to cost you money to build.
And a lot of these modern ones cost a lot of money.
Tens and tens of millions of dollars.
We could spend a lot less than that and still make beautiful churches.
In principle, it doesn't cost anything.
Beauty in principle does not have any inherent cost.
Now you do have to pay someone, an artist or something, so it will cost you.
but there's no reason why it needs to cost a certain amount.
So, and then they'll say, well, it's better to have simple churches.
Again, simplicity and beauty can go hand-in-hand, so that's not a response to my point at all.
And then they say, and I saw a lot of this, that, well, the buildings mean nothing.
They have no value.
Physical beauty has no value.
It doesn't matter at all.
In fact, I saw someone say exactly those words, that the buildings mean nothing.
They have no meaning.
Now, this attitude is called Gnosticism.
This is not really a Christian attitude.
This is Gnostic.
The Gnostics believed that all physical beauty and all material existence in general is entirely vain and worthless and even evil.
That's what Gnostics believe.
But Gnosticism is a heresy and it's been long repudiated by Orthodox Christianity.
The true Christian understanding and the more thoughtful sort of philosophically grounded understanding is that beauty is meaningful.
Okay, so to say that it means nothing... Now, I'm not saying it's the most important thing.
But to look at a building like the Notre Dame and say, well, that means nothing.
Not only is that a Gnostic point of view, but it's unhuman.
You can't actually feel it.
It means nothing, really?
really has no value?
Imagine living a life with no beauty at all.
If you really think that physical beauty means nothing, has no value, means nothing at all.
Okay, well, imagine living with no beauty.
Imagine living in just a totally bland room and a bland landscape and there's no beauty to speak of anywhere.
Just dreary, mundane, ugliness everywhere.
And some of us, you know, almost do live in a situation like that.
But imagine you had no access to physical beauty whatsoever.
You would want to kill yourself after a while.
I mean, you literally would not want to continue living.
Because life would be so bleak and despair-inducing.
Your existence would be so dreary that you wouldn't even want to live.
So beauty is an essential need, an essential human need.
It's not nothing.
And the other objection I've heard is that, well, beauty is subjective.
So who am I to call any church ugly, right?
How can I say that?
Well again, here we've got an attitude that is incompatible with Orthodox Christianity, and one that displays a deep philosophical ignorance.
What I notice more and more when talking to Christians is that there really is, you know, obviously churches are not instilling any kind of philosophical foundation in their congregations whatsoever.
Because this is just a point of view.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
This is the kind of modernist tripe that Christians have rejected for centuries.
And now all of a sudden you have all these Christians saying it, not realizing that they can't say that as a Christian.
It's completely incompatible with your faith.
Just think about it for two seconds.
And it's not a coincidence that every person on the planet that you meet, barring the insane people, will say that a mountain range is more beautiful than a puddle of slush on the side of the road after a snowstorm.
And they'll say the Sistine Chapel is more beautiful than a bag of your dog's fecal matter.
Everyone arrives at that conclusion not by coincidence, but by our inherent recognition of something objective in beauty.
Now, I say that it's incompatible with Christianity because God is the source of all beauty.
That's the Christian understanding.
God is the standard of beauty.
Therefore, if you believe in the Christian God, you really can't believe that beauty is subjective.
Now, there is a subjective element in how we perceive it and how it speaks to us.
So, there are certain things that I can recognize as objectively beautiful.
Yet, they just don't do it for me quite as much as something else.
Like, I can listen to a symphony and recognize that this is beautiful music.
However, it's not something that I would sit and listen to for very long.
But it is beautiful.
I recognize that.
Now, if I were to listen to Mozart or something and say, oh, this is disgusting, this is ew, ew, disgusting.
If I were to vomit at the sound of Mozart, well, that shows that there's something disordered about me.
I don't have to love it.
It doesn't have to be my favorite thing.
But I should be able to perceive that it is beautiful.
And so we all have our own tastes and we all have, you know, some people, uh, you know, love a beach more than a mountain range.
You get more of a, of an emotional experience looking at the ocean than you do mountains.
And everyone is different in that way.
But even if you're that way, you're not going to be grossed out by a mountain range, right?
You're going to, you're going to acknowledge and see that it is something beautiful, even if it just doesn't connect with you on the same level.
So that's the subjective element in perception, but beauty itself is about something inherent in the thing that we're talking about.
Beauty is an objective quality in a thing.
Finally, I'm told that, well, it's idol worship to have beautiful churches with statues and so on.
And this is just silly.
Do you think that, I mean, idol worship?
Do you think anyone worshipped the Notre Dame Cathedral as a god?
Do you think anyone was tempted to literally worship the building as a god?
When someone looks at the Piera, or, you know, a great sculpture by one of the Renaissance artists, do you think anyone is tempted to worship it?
Like, they think that the thing itself is god?
Now, maybe the pagans were, but that's not a temptation that you and I have.
When you look at a beautiful ocean panoramic, are you tempted to start worshiping Poseidon?
No!
You just, you notice that it's beautiful, you love looking at it, it brings your mind to God!
To the God, the real God.
The same with beauty in a church, and Christian symbolism in a church.
Now here's what really gets me.
These Christians who get all weirded out by statues or stained glass or whatever, who apparently can't see the symbolic significance of it, these are the same ones who would have a heart attack if they caught you not standing in front of the flag for the Pledge of Allegiance.
If you don't have your hand on your heart, you're standing, if you kneel or you sit, these are the same ones that are practically going to have a seizure from seeing you do that.
And God forbid, if you were to burn a flag in front of them, they would call for the death penalty for you.
So, they see the value in secular symbols, in American symbols, and they don't consider that to be idol worship.
Oh, a flag touches the ground.
It's, you know, it's blasphemy.
So that's not idol worship.
And I'm not saying that it is, but I don't know how you could say that that's not idol worship, but having a beautiful church and a statue is.
So, secular symbols are okay, but Christian symbols aren't?
Symbols that bring your mind to America are fine, but symbols that bring your mind to God are not fine?
I can't understand that mentality.
It makes no sense.
It's an irrational mentality.
It just is.
And if anything is idol worship in those scenarios, it's got to be the flag thing.
And again, I don't think that is.
But if one of those is, it's the flag one.
Okay, but if you're if you're able to see that a flag, yes, it is in a utilitarian materialistic sense, it's just a it's just a cloth, right?
It's all it is.
But if you're able to see that, yeah, I mean, physically, that's what it is.
But it stands it represents it brings to mind something greater than that.
Well, if you can see that with the flag, why can't you see it?
With art and churches and stained glass and statues.
Why can't you see it there?
I just, I don't get it.
All right.
A couple other things I wanted to mention.
One other quick note related to the Notre Dame burning.
Listen, you know I'm a big critic of Ilhan Omar, the freshman Democratic representative.
I'm a critic of hers.
I don't like her.
And I don't agree with pretty much anything she stands for.
But she sent out a tweet yesterday about Notre Dame burning.
And I'll read what the tweet said.
She said, Okay, that was her tweet, Ilhan Omar.
It's fine, right?
It's fine.
It's two sentences.
It's basically in line with what every other politician said about it on both sides of the spectrum.
It's in line with what a lot of people said, with things that I said on Twitter yesterday.
It's fine, right? It's fine.
And it's two sentences.
It's basically in line with what every other politician said about it on both sides of the spectrum.
It's in line with what a lot of people said, with things that I said on Twitter yesterday.
It's fine.
But of course we live in a culture now where on both sides of the spectrum,
we're constantly looking, if there's someone we disagree with
and who we think is usually wrong, and Omar is usually wrong,
Well, it's like we're incapable of any kind of keeping things in perspective, right?
So if we think she's usually wrong, then that means that she has to be wrong about literally everything she says.
There has to be something wrong with everything she, every word she speaks, every public statement she makes, there has to be something wrong with all of it.
And so we start picking apart every little thing to find things to complain about.
And that's what people did with this tweet.
They said, well, art and architecture, it's a church.
Why didn't you call it a church?
You didn't say anything about Jesus or Christ or God!
Come on, guys.
Come on.
If Donald Trump or Ted Cruz or whoever Republican had sent that exact same tweet, no conservative would be criticizing it, and nobody would.
There's nothing where it's fine.
We don't need to look for something to complain about with every little thing that a person we disagree with says.
Now, the reason why she didn't offer up a prayer to Christ is because she's Muslim, and so that's why she's not talking about Jesus Christ.
And yeah, she didn't call it a church, but we all know that it's a church, so I don't think we need her to tell us that.
Maybe she was assuming that we already know it's a church, and so you don't need to be reminded.
Do you actually need her to say, uh, P.S., by the way, I am referring to the church, Notre Dame Cathedral?
You know what she means.
I just, that's my response to it.
Because I get the same treatment from the other side a lot of the times.
Or I'll say something and maybe it's clumsily worded, maybe it isn't, but people are looking for a reason to pounce.
And my response a lot of the times is, look, you know what I meant.
Just back off, calm down.
You know what I'm trying to say.
So stop pretending that you don't.
All right.
Let's see.
I had a bunch of emails.
Well, I mentioned, okay, I guess I'll go to emails now.
MattWalshow at gmail.com.
MattWalshow at gmail.com.
So I talked briefly yesterday about people who worship their dogs.
Now that is a form of idol worship that really does happen in the United States.
And my whole point that I made yesterday on the show, if you didn't see it, was I wasn't insulting dogs or anything like that.
I just said dogs aren't people.
People are more important.
You shouldn't love dogs more than people.
That was my whole point.
And as you might expect, of course, it's got some responses.
I'll read one response.
So he says, Dear Matt, I have always respected you, but there's something wrong with people who don't like dogs.
I have no problem admitting I prefer dogs to people.
A dog has never lied to me or cheated me or bullied me.
Dogs are the perfect example of unconditional love.
I feel sorry for you that you don't understand that or see it.
So I got a lot of stuff like that.
First of all, your dog never lied to you because he doesn't have vocal cords?
He's incapable of speech, so that's why he's never told you a lie.
But the other reason why he doesn't do those bad things is because he's not capable of making moral choices, okay?
So when you say, well, dogs never hurt my feelings.
Yeah, but that's because dogs are not capable of it.
They're intrinsically incapable of making moral choices.
It's not like every dog in the world Can make a moral choice and just always makes the right one so that dogs are these angelic, saintly beings who are perfectly virtuous.
No, that's not the case.
They don't assess things on a moral landscape.
They don't have access to that sort of thought process.
So that's why they don't do those things.
Why is it?
Now, there are dogs who hurt people.
Dogs maul people to death.
Dogs can rip up your furniture.
Dogs can poop on your rug.
But why don't we hold dogs legally responsible when they do those things?
And why is it absurd to get angry at a dog even if he does chew up your carpet?
Why is that?
Because he didn't know what he was doing.
That's the whole reason.
But if you're going to ascribe virtuous motivations to dogs, if you're going to actually claim that dogs are capable of real courage and real self-sacrificing love and real virtue, Then you would have to say that the dogs who do bad things are actually evil and should go to prison.
They should face legal penalties.
It doesn't make any sense to say, oh, yeah, well, they're capable.
Yeah, whenever they do something that appears to be good, well, that's a virtuous choice they made as dogs.
But if they do something bad, no, it's not their fault.
They're just dogs.
You see, again, it's irrational.
It doesn't make any sense.
You've got to have one view of dogs here.
It can't be both.
Either they make moral choices or they don't, and the answer is they don't, which is why you can't really give them credit for not doing mean things that people do.
And in fact, yes, there are people who do terrible things.
That's true.
But every time that a person has acted kindly towards you, A person has told you the truth, a person has been loyal to you, a person has comforted you.
Anytime a person has done something good for you, and I guarantee that many people have done good things for you, whoever you are in your life, those acts of goodness and virtue are infinitely more meaningful than anything that any dog has ever done.
Because those people that did those good things, they made a choice.
They knew they had two options.
And they knew this, they understood and comprehended the sacrifice they were making in paying you that kindness.
And yet they did it anyway.
And so it is so much more meaningful.
Yeah, people are more complicated because they make choices and they might hurt you and they might do bad things.
Just like you do bad things.
By the way, if you say that you like people more, that dogs are better than people, you're saying that dogs are better than you too.
That you are worse than a dog.
And maybe that's all you're really saying.
I think maybe it's just a reflection of your opinion of yourself.
But regardless, it's great that dogs don't hurt your feelings, but a doorknob won't hurt your feelings either.
A tree will never rob a bank.
An ant will never bully a kid on a school bus.
The color blue will never do anything bad to you.
Because all of these things are incapable of moral evil.
All right, let's see.
This is from The Beardocratic Fascist.
Greetings, Matt of the Walsh.
Just wanted to know your thoughts on teen beards.
I know beards are great, but teen beards look like someone cut the bristles off a toothbrush and glued them onto a bloody face.
So, what should I tell my young friends?
I know it's harsh, but I think they might have to, dare I say, shave.
Well, you are no beardocratic fascist if you would ever tell anyone to shave.
Man or woman, okay?
Child or adult.
Listen, yeah, teenage beards are not aesthetically pleasing, but you need to experiment with your facial hair, and we all went through awkward phases with our facial hair.
You experiment, you figure out what works for you.
But to ever discourage anyone from expressing themselves through facial hair, I think is just, it is an abomination, and how dare you?
This is from Miriam, says, huge fan of the podcast.
On Monday, you were talking about the alcohol debate in the church, and you kept saying miracle.
It is pronounced miracle.
Hurts my brain to hear you say it wrong.
My name is Miriam, meaning that people replace the I with an A all the time.
It brings forth a certain anger in me that is only remedied by throwing my phone out the window.
Please stop abusing the word miracle, or I might have to go to therapy.
Well, Miriam, who are you to say, okay?
It's in the eye of the beholder here.
If I want to say miracle, I'm going to say miracle.
Miriam.
How are you supposed to say it?
Miracle?
Is that what people say?
I don't know.
It must be a Baltimore thing.
I don't know.
Miracle.
Miracle.
Myrical?
Myrical.
It's a myrical!
You know, now I've forgotten how to say the word because of you, Miriam.
Um, let's see here.
Got one more.
We'll go to Christy.
Says, Matt, I appreciate your thoughtful perspectives on a variety of issues, including theology.
I was genuinely shocked.
Genuinely.
That's another one you could get on me for.
Pronouncing strangely.
I was genuinely shocked when you said that the rapture is a new teaching that didn't exist for thousands of years after Christ.
I had no idea that something I've always assumed was a universally Christian doctrine I've been taught from childhood is even debated, and I was intrigued to hear why you didn't believe it was actually a thing.
I was disappointed when you said that the only verse rapture-believing people use to support their belief are the Matthew verses.
I had literally just read Luke 17 to my kids that morning, which says, when the Son of Man returns, it will be like it was in Noah's day.
The people enjoyed banquets and parties and wedding night, right up to the time Noah entered his boat and the flood came and destroyed them all.
And the world would be as it was in the days of Lot.
People went about their daily business, eating and drinking, buying and selling, farming and building, until the morning Lot left Sodom.
Then fire and burning sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all.
Yes, it will be business as usual, right up to the day when the Son of Man revealed Is revealed on that day a person out on the deck of a roof
Must go down into the house to pack a person out in the field must not return home
Remember what happened to lots wife if you cling to your life
You will lose it and if you let your life go you will save it that night two people will be asleep in one bed
One will be taken the other left two women will be grinding flour together at the mill one will be taken the other left
end of Bible verse These verses sure make it sound like Jesus is coming, is taking, is something to watch for, and we are the ones who will be taken.
Other verses of warning to be alert and watchful also come right to mind without even searching.
The verses about the bridesmaids whose lamps are empty when the bridegroom comes, I've always assumed those verses refer to being watchful and ready for the coming of Christ.
Also the verses I've always read as an actual description of the rapture.
Quote, the trumpet shall sound and the dead in Christ will first rise.
Would you mind giving this topic a little more thorough treatment?
It felt like you set up a straw man when you said the Matthew verses are the ones only ever used to defend the idea of a rapture.
Okay, so I don't think I said the Matthew verse is the only one used.
I think I said it's one of the main ones used, and in fact, you used that same one.
You used Luke's version of the Matthew verse, but it's the same verse.
You're getting it from two different Gospels.
It's the same thing.
So, that's the first thing.
Also, I'm not sure what translation you were giving me there, but this is a translation that uses phrases like business as usual, which is certainly not a phrase that existed in the first century.
So, I'm not sure what translation you used.
There might be a translation problem here as well.
What I'll say again is that I think the verse that you quoted there at length clearly refers to the wicked people being taken.
It does not refer to the good people being taken.
This is about the damnation of the wicked.
It says, when the Son of Man returns, it will be like it was in Noah's day.
And then it goes on from there.
In Noah's day, the people who were taken from the earth through the form of a flood were the wicked ones.
So I think that's the point in that verse.
What I'll say about some of the other ones you mentioned...
There's one you didn't even mention.
I think it's in Thessalonians that talks about, you know, the righteous ascending and meeting Christ in the clouds.
You didn't even mention that one.
I'll give you that one.
Maybe that's probably your best one to pull from.
But there again, now I just think that, yes, now, when you're proof texting, when you're looking for a verse that matches a theological point of view that you already held before even looking at the Bible, you're going to be able to find a verse that will support it.
And that's the problem with proof texting and looking at things out of context, which I think the rapture is pulled out of context.
So yes, that particular verse in Thessalonians, that would match up with the rapture.
But it's just, you cannot hang this entire idea of the rapture on that one little verse.
And that's just, that's an invalid way of looking at the Bible in general.
And something else I'll keep in mind here is that the Maybe it seems like semantics, but it's really not.
We know that heaven does not literally exist in the clouds, right?
We know that.
I mean, children might think of it that way, but we know that if you go up, you're gonna find clouds, and you're gonna eventually leave the atmosphere, and you'll be in outer space.
Heaven is not literally physically located above us.
When we speak about God above, and when we look up to pray, and all that kind of stuff, that's metaphorical language.
So, now, maybe there'll be people meeting Jesus in the clouds at the end of time, but that's not really, what really even would be the point of that?
Because heaven is not actually literally in the clouds.
So what I'm saying is I would see that as metaphorical language, the same way when Jesus talks about God above and God being above us and in the heavens and so on, which Jesus does talk about, we take that metaphorically because we know that he's not literally up sitting in a cloud.
Right?
Um, now you could say, well, Jesus ascended into heaven and we are led to believe by scripture that there was a physical ascension.
Like he actually rose above the people who were witnessing it.
And yes, but again, there, um, it's not like Jesus had to physically go up to get into heaven.
So if he physically ascended in front of the, uh, the people who witnessed it, then, um, I would say, I would think that that was for their benefit, you know, because of the symbolic significance of going up, above, in a spiritual sense.
It wasn't something that, you didn't have to go that direction to get to heaven, it was just something for the benefit of the rest of us.
We could talk about the ascension.
That makes a lot more sense to us, just sort of intuitively, than God... I don't know how else you would refer to it.
If God just were to... or if Jesus were to just vanish into another realm, into another... into, you know, heaven, how would we even refer to that?
How would we intuitively conceive of it?
So that's what the ascension is for.
But at the end of time, I'm not really sure what the point of those theatrics would be.
Maybe that's how it will be.
I don't know.
But what I'm saying is, the overall doctrine of the rapture is a modern invention.
It's from the 19th century.
And for centuries, Christians read those verses, and they had no concept of the rapture as we know it today.
Just because it's modern doesn't necessarily make it wrong, but it should make you pretty suspicious of it.
Why is it that every Christian before that point read the Bible and never noticed that?
And now all of a sudden we do.
Is it because we have some sort of new insight that's new to us?
That the Holy Spirit kept hidden from Christians for 18-19 centuries?
Or is it because we've just come up with a new theological concept and we're looking for justification in the Bible?
I think it's probably more the latter.
But, that's my opinion.
Alright, we'll leave it there.
Thanks everybody for watching.
Thanks for listening.
Godspeed.
Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris burns and no one wants to mention the spate of church desecrations and arson fires that's been sweeping through France all through Lent.
