Dave Weichel and Pastor Joel Weben critique the American Evangelical Church for adopting intersectionality, critical race theory, and postmodern deconstructionism rooted in Derrida and Marx. They reject theistic evolution as a demonic oxymoron that contradicts Genesis by implying God used death before sin, thereby undermining biblical truth. The speakers argue that prioritizing empathy over objective standards fosters relativism, enabling destructive ideologies like Marxism. Ultimately, they contend the church must choose reformation over revolution to avoid depraved minds that deny God's power while holding a form of godliness. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Unique Pastoral Testimony00:15:31
Applying God's Word to every aspect of life.
This is Theology Applied.
All right.
Welcome to another episode of Theology Applied.
I'm your host, Pastor Joel Weben with Right Response Ministries.
Today, I am privileged to have as our guest a personal friend of mine, Dave Weichel.
He has recently started a podcast called The Reformed Operator.
He serves in the military here in San Diego, California.
He's also in training at his local church.
It's an OPC church and training for eldership.
He used to be a Baptist, like all Presbyterians.
They're born Baptist and eventually transfer over.
If it wasn't for Baptist churches, Presbyterians would have no pool for gaining members.
And so he's one of those many guys.
There's no pool up to baptize anybody.
So, yeah, they don't need a pool, the Presbyterians.
They're just a little bit of water.
They're more environmental friendly, more conscious of the environment.
They have 10 showers.
Yeah.
So Dave is a good friend of mine and was a part of our church for a little bit as they were transitioning him and his wife.
And so I'm going to let him share a little bit of that story with just his journey into Reformed theology, his journey into Presbyterianism.
And so, anyways, all that being said, a friend of mine, and I'm honored to have you on the show.
So, Dave, could you just tell us a little bit about yourself and maybe give us our listeners your testimony?
How did you come to Christ?
Yeah, sure.
So, I kind of grew up.
Moving all over the place.
My parents were in the military.
So I lived all over.
My parents were fairly devout Christians.
But one of the things was, we would just go to basically any church.
I mean, for a while we went to an Anglican church.
A big part of the background, though, and the critical piece of it was I grew up charismatic.
And so a little bit of background as well.
Like I had to insert this because Colossians 2 8 is a Is a key verse for this company, C2A.
I actually worked at that store, Not of This World, in the mall.
And their key verse there is Colossians 2 8, C2A, that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on the ways of the world rather than on Christ.
And so I grew up in a very Christian background.
But I would argue that even in being raised in that, I ended up not being a Christian.
I wasn't a Christian until about five or six years ago.
And My parents would pursue these churches that were very, very focused on the word of faith and specifically like speaking in tongues and healings.
And that really affected me in a lot of ways, specifically because I was looking for this miraculous experience to kind of prove that Christ was real, that God was there, and that that was really the only way that I could ultimately verify to myself that this was actually true.
And so I set myself up kind of as a standard and had some bizarre, bizarre encounters.
I don't know how far you want me to get into that, but in the charismatic church, because I was a leader.
That's always interesting.
Yeah.
So there's, I don't know how familiar you are with Todd Bentley.
Yeah.
He was a big part of one of the visiting guys who would show up very often.
And I remember very specifically, he took us, the youth leaders, out to, I think it was Panera.
We went back up to the youth room and he started telling us about all kinds of interesting stuff.
One of those things is that he was raising dead people.
I was like, all right, cool.
Do you have any videos of that?
And he's like, Oh, no, I don't want to be a stumbling block.
And I was like, Well, you're telling me about it.
So where's the testimony?
And so that was a very unique experience.
Then he went further, and this is where it gets kind of weird.
He started talking about being caught up into the third heaven and visiting with Jesus.
And Jesus invites him into a bed and proceeds to rub him with oil.
And it was a very, very bizarre situation.
And I was like, I, Even then, I was like, I got to go to the bathroom.
And I got up, walked out, and I just didn't come back.
And I stayed in the church for quite a while, and then we moved.
And that was a big part of my background.
And what did me was I actually went to a concert.
And at that concert, I started feeling the same feelings I would feel when the worship music was going and people were speaking in tongues and people are getting slain in the spirit.
And I was like, well, if I can feel the same real feeling, And it's all about my feelings.
Like, how is this any different?
I'm not missing out on anything by not being in the church.
And so I wandered off for a long time.
And I actually, by the grace of God, I met my wife and we started working through some things together.
And we both came to faith ultimately.
We were both baptized through a Wesleyan church skyline.
And then ultimately, we came to start reading scripture.
And as I started reading scripture, I was like, wait a second.
Like, I wasn't trusting in Christ alone for my salvation.
I wasn't seeing myself as a sinner.
And I hadn't been given a new heart.
Like, I wasn't a really repentant person.
And I was missing being led by men in the church who would come alongside me, help me through scripture, who had been through a lot of the things that I had, rather than being devoted completely to just a, Kind of life coaching.
It was more about pointing out, like, here's what's in scripture.
I read through Matthew Henry's commentary along with the yearly Bible reading plan.
And I was like, yeah, there's just no way that I could refute this.
I mean, this is, and that's kind of how I came to reform theology after coming to faith.
So that was a real big part of it was just reading the word of God, which is the most effective means.
Yep.
That's great.
Yeah.
It's funny you mentioned Todd Bentley.
I, you know, I remember at the time I was, I guess I would have still been in my last few years.
Undergrad, I was in Dallas, Texas, going to Dallas Baptist University at the time.
I was at Jack Deere.
He wrote, Surprised by the Voice of God and Surprised by the Holy Spirit.
And so I was still in my charismatic days.
And so I was in his church.
And Todd Bentley was a big deal.
Jack Deere was one of the guys.
He was the pastor of the church I was a part of at the time.
And he was one of the guys who sat on the platform at one of the, was it Pensacola, Florida?
Is that where?
Bentley was?
Where was Bentley?
I remember him.
It was Florida.
I remember where he's based out of, but he was all over the place.
Yeah, I mean, he traveled a lot.
But I remember one of the things that he liked that was always stood out was like he predicted that at one of his revival meetings that Jesus was going to physically manifest on the stage with him.
And which, you know, so things like that, which is, I admire his boldness, you know, because that's kind of like a do or die kind of situation.
You know, it's not going to happen.
And when it doesn't happen, it's going to be difficult to backpedal and to somehow explain why your prediction was completely false.
But yeah, he was a very interesting character.
He was a big deal for a while, at least in the camps that sounds like you and I were both in.
And so, yeah, my testimony is similar raised in the charismatic church.
And I went to Christ for the Nations.
I don't know if you're, I think you're familiar with Christ for the Nations.
Have you heard of that?
Christ for the Nations?
Yeah, I actually was accepted for admission there and then ended up not going.
Yeah, good for you.
Good call.
Good call.
Yeah, yeah.
It was rough.
So I did that for my first two years of school, and it was definitely a health and wealth prosperity preaching school.
One of the professors there, I remember he said he was talking about faith, and he said that if we had enough faith, because all of our sickness and disease and all those things are ultimately rooted in a lack of faith.
And so his argument was that if we had enough faith, that we would never die, that we could actually live forever.
And that was very interesting.
So, anyways, all right.
Well, praise God that He brought you out of that.
And it sounds like He used the instrument that He always does.
He used His word.
And it's really sad.
I mean, one of the things that I pick out of your testimony is that, yeah, God used men in your life at a certain point.
But it sounds like initially the man that God used was somebody that you actually didn't have a personal relationship with, namely the late, great Puritan Matthew Henry.
It's beautiful, but it's also tragic because that's my testimony.
That's so many people's testimony.
For me, it wasn't Matthew Henry, but so many guys in our generation, you hear their testimony, and it's like they just needed a spiritual father to exegete the scripture for them and to teach them the word.
And because local churches had such an absence of biblically grounded, theologically sound men who were willing to come alongside young men and disciple them.
We have, I mean, we literally today we have tens of thousands, if not more, people with a testimony very similar to yours and mine, which is that they were discipled by somebody who's either dead, you know, or somebody that they never even personally met, like R.C. Sproul or John Piper, you know, that we have this kind of testimony.
It's the Word of God doing the work of God, but it's the Word of God being, you know, like John MacArthur, you know, the Word of God, the truth of God being unleashed one verse at a time as.
A man is exegeting the word, interpreting and shedding light on its meaning.
That's how God saves.
That's how God nourishes.
That's how God develops us, disciples us, grows us.
And ultimately, we'd love to see that happen in the local church with men who are physically present there.
They can have a personal relationship with individuals, younger men in the church.
And sadly, it seems like there's an entire generation of young men who were discipled on YouTube because.
Because they didn't have a man like that, you know, who's actually literally present in their local church because there's been such an absence.
And so it's sad.
I think that's one of the things that, you know, we probably want to discuss on this episode as we're the title that we've kind of crafted for it is A Candid Conversation of the State of the American Evangelical Church.
And I think that's kind of starts to get to our subject at hand a little bit that we just, right now, it seems like we're still recovering from a generation that their mantra was doctrine divides.
And so they just, they didn't want to get technical.
They didn't want to get specific.
Things were ambiguity was massive.
Everything was vague and everything was theologically very shallow.
We only want to center on the things that are essentials.
Let's not go any deeper than that because we're just going to start driving all these fault lines and fracturing and dividing the church.
And so, out of a desire, an incentive to somehow quench division in the church, the church, our previous generation, our parents' generation, it seems like they just had an aversion towards doctrine.
And then, you know, young guys like you and I had all these questions that were never answered.
And some rebelled and left the church.
And then some, such as yourself, maybe rebelled, but in God's mercy were brought back to the church.
And God did a lot of that through social media and through online ministries.
And I'm grateful for that.
So, all right.
Well, let me get to another question here a little bit more about your personal testimony that this is kind of where.
I started to develop a friendship with you and kind of came into your story.
But I was somewhat involved in a season, and you and your wife, Natalie, in your life, when you guys were in the process of leaving a church that you had thoroughly been involved in for quite some time.
And I know that you loved that church.
I know that it was very difficult for the two of you to make that decision ultimately to leave.
And so I was just wondering, maybe kind of again, because I think that this could be used as a case study.
For the larger church within maybe the Reformed camp or at least evangelicalism.
Could you share a little bit about that experience and why you decided to leave a church that I know you love?
Yeah, it's kind of a unique situation.
It was an Acts 29 church, which kind of brings some.
Acts 29 is a network, it's not a denomination, but sometimes it gets bandied around like kind of a semi denomination, but not really.
The way some people use the term, but we saw a lot of changes happening over a period of about two years where things started getting brought in intersectionality, critical race theory, specifically, and specifically like ways that things were being handled as far as conversations about race.
Like, and you see that we're starting to bring in these lenses as adaptive tools, but They're completely outside the scope of scripture because they take it inherently unbiblical premise of multiple races.
There's only one race, which already we're on dangerous ground there, but it permeates into everything else.
The way you do homeless ministry, the way that you do how you handle a woman who's about to have an abortion.
Like, how do you handle that situation?
And usually it's just in that view, it's just hopefully give them some counseling later.
There's a sense of relational emphasis rather than on a, this is the truth.
Like, please turn from what you're doing, repent.
And that really came to a boiling head because the real danger to a lot of that is when you start to find things like the Calvin's Institutes and you start reading through it and you're like, wait a second.
Shutting Down Dialogue00:02:46
So, what are your views on how do we apply the law as Christians?
What does that look like?
And then things start falling off, and your ministry then becomes focused on making people feel comfortable to find Jesus where the gospel is an offense.
No matter what you do, the gospel is still an offense.
And so that's the part where things started to kind of come undone because you're starting to see these biblically faithful families are like, we're putting the emphasis in the wrong area.
We need to feed the sheep, and we also need to draw in sheep.
We don't want to build up goats.
And the real danger is when you're not practicing that rightly, you can slip very quickly into some dangerous terrain.
And ultimately, that was a big part of why we left just a really poor handling of a lot of the conversations that are coming out right now.
Yeah.
And none of them are actually conversations, as I know you would agree.
It's basically a think tank session.
With a bunch of people who already hold the same view.
It's an echo chamber.
Anytime there's actually a conversation where, you know, I think of, you know, there was like that historic panel.
I forget which conference it was, but it was like Chandler was on it, Keller was on it, I think Piper was on it, a few big dogs.
And then there was Vodi Bakum.
And Vodi just kept getting shut down.
They were talking about racial reconciliation and oppression and those kinds of things.
And Vodi disagreed.
And he was being completely respectful and thoughtful.
And you could just tell, like, they wouldn't engage his arguments.
It was just, you know, it was logical fallacies, ad hominem, you know, like you're not being sensitive and just shutting him down.
And it's funny.
It's like what Vodi was attempting to do was actually have one of those conversations we keep hearing people talk about, right?
Everybody talks about that we're going to have a conversation on race.
We're going to have a conversation on this, conversation on that.
And Vodi was, you know, I guess he just took them at their word that they actually wanted to have a conversation.
Point of view, and he was just so quickly dismissed.
The irony for me is it's funny that what he was pushing back on, what he was disagreeing with, it all had to do with ultimately, you know, like race and intersectionality and dividing the world up into groups of oppressors and oppressed.
And it had a lot to do with the black community and black people being oppressed.
And so the irony to me is that you had a bunch of white men telling the one black guy on the stage to shut up.
Black Voices and Consensus00:03:24
Because he's disagreeing with them over whether or not he's oppressed.
I mean, it was just, it was silly.
So, but yeah, man, I go ahead.
Go ahead.
Oh, I was just going to say, I just recently, like I've been finishing my undergrad recently, and I actually came across some stuff that really brings out where that view comes from that a black person is actually a white person.
And it's this there's a guy named Noam Chomsky, and he's a linguist.
It's all about internalizing.
So they flip the external internal.
And it's basically that internally, you've now this thing that was external to you.
So you've internalized it.
And so now it doesn't matter what you are, it's now what you identify as.
So there's like that split.
But Noam Chomsky is the guy who came up with that.
I didn't realize that until a couple of weeks ago.
I was like, oh, wow.
Right.
Well, that gets into the whole like skin folk, but not kin folk.
It's the idea, you know, like black voices, the idea that, You know, black voices doesn't, it doesn't, it's not as simple as just meaning that you're black and you have a voice.
You can be black and not have a black voice.
You can have a black exterior, like what you're speaking.
So, you can have black skin in terms of your ethnicity, but not a black voice because you've been so oppressed that you've been ultimately accepted your oppression.
And so now your voice is actually, you're an Uncle Tom.
Your voice is actually just a voice of the oppressor.
It's a voice that's been suppressed so long and it's been captured now.
It's almost like a Stockholm syndrome that you now are just a puppet for the white man, for the master, and speaking on his behalf.
So, although you're skin folk, You are black exterior in the exterior.
You're not kinfolk.
You're not actually black because you're not ultimately in line with the narrative.
You know, some other pushback, you know, because people are like, we need to elevate black voices.
And it's like, I love black voices.
I like Virgil Walker.
I like Daryl Harrison.
I like Votie Bockham.
I like Candace Owens.
I like Larry Elder.
I like Thomas Soule.
Like, I love black voices.
I got a lot of black voices that I listen to.
They're fantastic.
And the problem is that they'll say, yeah, but those aren't black voices.
Even though they're black men and women, they're not actually.
Black voices.
And one of the lines you'll hear people say is like, consensus matters.
I've heard people say that, like, consensus matters, meaning that, but at the end of the day, like, get outside of, you know, just the category of ethnicity and racial divides.
What you're saying is like, that's just mob justice.
Consensus matters.
Like, that's the whole problem in our nation right now is that we're continuing to gravitate towards in our politics and in this cultural war, all these kinds of things.
Gravitating towards a way of doing life, a way of doing setting up society in such a way that 51% can just strong arm and absolutely demand anything from the 49%.
It's not a democratic republic anymore.
And so there's just so much at stake.
And so, yeah, it's crazy.
I like that.
Race in the Reformed Camp00:03:51
Who was it?
Chomsky?
Is that who you said?
Yeah, he's a linguist from the mid.
Century, 1950s on.
I don't remember exactly when.
Gotcha.
He's a very influential for the whole linguistics piece of it.
Yeah.
Cool.
Going back to the church that you guys ended up leaving, and then you kind of found refuge with us for a season and then went ahead and landed at the church you're at now.
What's the name of the church?
What is it?
Pilgrims or Providence?
What is it?
Pilgrim.
Yep.
Pilgrim Church.
All right, cool.
Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
Providence is your daughter's name, correct?
Yep, that's right.
Providence is also a good church name, though.
That wouldn't be bad.
Yeah, I know.
Yeah, it wouldn't be a bad one.
I don't know about that.
Yeah, cool.
So, in leaving, going back to that, leaving that church, you talked about like the law of God.
And I think that's important for our listeners just to understand.
I think that's another thing that's just happened in specifically the Reformed camp.
And Acts 29, I think, is a great.
A great example of this, as you know, I was an Acts 29 pastor and decided to leave the network about two years ago for a host of reasons.
One of the big ones being, you know, critical race theory.
I just got tired at a certain point, right after like six years in a row of going to our annual conference and being told that I was racist for not having enough black people in our church.
There's a certain point, you know, where you're just like, you know, and I was pastoring in Point Loma, it's less than 2%, Point Loma, San Diego, less than 2% black people.
And so, you know, and it's just like, what do you do?
You know what I mean?
Like, I think of like, what do you do if you're in, you know, Montana, you know, or South Dakota, you know, and you go to this, you know, national annual conference and it's like, there are no black people, you know, like black people don't live where I live, you know, like shouldn't the church be an accurate reflection of the community that they're in?
And even with that, you know, like I do believe that there's something there.
But this idea that, like, yeah, just it puts way too much emphasis on ethnicity, way too much emphasis on.
Diversity.
The idea is that we want to, like, we believe that the kingdom of God is diverse at large, like every tribe, tongue, and nation.
Like, so, like, Conrad Mbewe and Vodi Bakum, I don't think they're concerned about having a certain percentage of their churches being white because they're in Africa.
People there are black, you know, so their churches are like, you know, like they're black.
It's a makeup of, you know, and so, I mean, if we live in a town that's very diverse and there are plenty of Places like that in America, then yeah, it stands to reason that our churches would be, you know, an accurate reflection of the community that we live in.
I think there's something to be said for that, but yeah, it just got emphasized so much.
But it wasn't just race, it really was like what you're getting at.
These things are like not conflated, they're correlated.
Like it really, there's a correlation between the law of God, and as the law of God continued to like deteriorate, in my assessment, in the church at large.
You had this surge of critical race theory, intersectionality, this massive obsession with racial reconciliation and women not being oppressed, and all these different categories of oppressed groups and hearing them out.
And it's because, I think in many ways, it's because we lost the standard, right?
We lost the standard.
So you just start creating, you replace it with all these other ones.
Mourn With Those Who Mourn00:15:48
And so, like, I'll never forget, I remember one of the.
The panels at one of the Acts 29 conferences that I was at.
They got a bunch of guys.
I think Thabiti was the guest speaker for that conference.
Thabiti was there.
And then you had Eric Mason, you had Leonce Crump, a guy named Brandon Washington, a few different black guys who were leaders in the network.
And then Matt Chandler was moderating.
And I remember it was like one of the shootings had just happened.
I can't remember which one.
It wasn't Michael Brown.
It was a little bit later than that, but it was another shooting.
But it just happened like two days ago.
And it was just the whole panel was just like, you know, how could this happen?
This is so wrong.
Our nation is systematically racist.
And I remember I just kept thinking, like, do we know that this shooting was actually unjust?
Like, do we don't even have the facts yet?
Like, we don't even have, like, we can't even, the presupposition that you guys have can't be substantiated.
Not yet.
Like eventually, hopefully, more facts will come out, you know.
And I remember just being, it was like the law of God, right?
The idea of two or three witnesses, the idea, like all those kind of things.
It just didn't matter.
It had no relevance in their minds, it had no importance.
It was just this thing happened, and all that matters is how it makes me feel.
So it doesn't matter if this was actually according to the books, if it was actually right for the police officer to draw their weapon and to fire.
None of that is relevant.
What's relevant is that people are hurting, and then boom, man, the go to verse.
Always is Romans 12, right?
Rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn.
And I just, I remember I was just thinking, it was the first time I had this thought.
I've used it a lot since then.
But I remember thinking, like, if Roe versus Wade was overturned tomorrow in our nation, I remember thinking just like there would be millions of people mourning.
Millions of people would be mourning their legal right to murder their children in their womb.
And so, as Christians, do we get Poland right now?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Explain that a little bit.
Yeah.
So, out in Poland, they basically outlawed, uh, Abortion.
And now everyone's taken to the streets.
They said they had their biggest protest in like at least the last half century.
Wow.
And they've just, I mean, the pictures are insane, but they made the decision like, look, we're not going to murder babies.
And we're going to be consistent in the way that we value human life.
Right.
And people are furious and people are mourning.
And so that's the problem.
So it's like mourn with those who mourn.
So do we mourn with those who are mourning the loss?
Of their ability to do that which is wicked in the sight of God?
Like, obviously, the answer is no.
So, I think implicitly in a text like that, we just have to implicitly understand that what the Lord is saying is like, mourn with those who are mourning righteously.
And we forget the first half of the verse is rejoice with those who rejoice.
And I think of rejoicing, biblical rejoicing.
And if we just take that and cross reference over to 1 Corinthians 13, it says, you know, that love, actual biblical love, not just.
Our culture's definition of love that changes day to day, but God's standard for love is, you know, it rejoices in the truth.
So if we're looking at like Romans 12, rejoice with those who rejoice, but we're called to model biblical love.
Well, love only rejoices in the truth.
It doesn't rejoice in lies, it doesn't rejoice in wickedness, it doesn't rejoice in unrighteousness, it rejoices in the truth.
So I think we could just look at a text like that rejoice with those who rejoice.
So long as it's in line with the truth, and therefore mourn with those who mourn, so long as it's in line with the truth.
And the problem is that the truth sometimes takes a little bit of time for it to surface, right?
So there's some event in our nation before we just immediately start drawing lines of division and taking sides and protesting and going to the streets or having another conversation at the Gospel Coalition conference or whatever about race.
Before we do all that and start citing the most recent event as proof positive for injustice and oppression, like love rejoices in the truth and love also mourns with things that are truthful.
And so, one of the things we have to wait for by a biblical standard and the law of God is we have to wait for the truth to come out and we should investigate.
And so, there has to be permission for us to be caring, for us to be sympathetic, not empathetic, not suffering in.
Because then we're no good to the person, but suffering with sympathetic comes from compassion.
So we want to be compassionate, we want to be caring, but we also can never be caring at the expense of truth.
That's when we start to compromise truth, we're no longer actually loving, we're no longer actually being caring.
So we want to love the person as much as we can while holding on to the truth.
It's like the person is drowning in quicksand and they may be screaming out in that moment, Get in the quicksand and drown with me.
And I think that's what a lot of our nation right now and the church.
I just want you to drown with me.
Empathy, right?
The Democratic Party is the party of empathy, right?
And whereas we've made empathy like the greatest of all virtues, but empathy, it's not like nowhere in the Bible is empathy ever described as a virtue.
And I would argue that empathy actually hamstrings, especially someone in a position of leadership, their ability to actually love and nurture and lead the people that God has assigned to them.
This idea of, I'm just going to drown with you rather than I'm going to put one foot in the quicksand and reach out one hand, but I'm also going to hold tight with standing on solid ground with my other foot and holding on to a branch and a tree or something that's solid, namely the truth.
I would identify that as God's.
Standard, God's law, God's truth.
And so I'm going to hold on.
So I'm going to love you as much as I can.
But one of the things I'm going to do is I'm not just going to extend to you what you want.
I'm going to extend to you by God's grace exactly what you need.
And you need compassion.
You need sympathy, not empathy, but sympathy.
You need someone to listen.
But you also, I know for me, when I'm hurt, I don't just need someone to listen.
I need someone to ask me thoughtful questions, I need someone to push back.
I need someone to cross examine, right?
Like the problem is, one is thought right until the other comes and cross examines.
I need people to cross examine my frustration, cross examine my venting, cross examine my self pity, cross examine my, you know what I mean?
Like, because I'm not infallible.
And so I don't mourn infallibly.
I don't get angry infallibly.
I mean, it is my anger, my sadness, my frustration, all these things, they're drenched.
They're absolutely drenched with my flesh.
And with the world that's constantly shaping or seeking to shape and inform my views.
And so the flesh, the world, the devil, the three great enemies of the Christian pilgrim, they're all influencing me.
I cannot ultimately remove myself from those things.
I live in this world.
The devil is real in my flesh, right?
Sin still remains within the members of my being.
As long as I'm in this life, I have not yet been saved from this body of death.
My soul has been saved, but I'm still in this flesh.
And so I need someone not just to listen to me, not just to.
Affirm me, not just to cry with me, but I need someone to challenge me.
I need someone to challenge me.
And one of the ways we do that is we ask, we cross examine and we ask for evidence.
We ask for facts, not just how do you feel?
You feel this way, but what are the facts?
What actually happened in this most recent shooting that made you so upset?
What actually, you know, and that's at a political national level, but in individual churches, you know.
And so my concern is that through racial reconciliation, through critical race theory, intersectionality, What really seeped into the church is as we started just gospel everything, right?
And I'm all for gospel centrality, but we made it gospel myopticism.
It's only gospel.
We got rid of the law, and especially the third use of the law, right?
That the law of God is good.
We delight in it.
It's a lamp into our feet.
We're not obeying the law in order to gain God's favor, but we are obeying the law as a response of gratitude for the favor we freely have in Christ by grace through faith in Him.
But we've gotten rid of the third use of the law, the standard of God was removed, and then all of a sudden we have standpoint epistemology, we have relativism, we have feelings over facts, we have all these different human fleshly standards coming into place, and we have no way to cross examine them because there's no ultimate truth anymore.
There's no universal reality, the absolute reality that we're able to say doesn't line up with this.
Yeah, man, I just like I've experienced that as a pastor in our local church level.
And I think that's a lot of what you and Natalie were experiencing in the church that you were coming from was just this gravitational pull away from the law of God.
And it starts, I think it starts with, it sounds so good.
It starts with like this obsession with grace.
It's all about grace, you know, and it's new covenant theology.
And it's just the way of Jesus, it's just following Jesus.
How is he leading?
And it's like, Following Jesus is great, but how do we follow Jesus?
How does Jesus communicate his will to me through the law?
Like, it's not just this subjective little, you know, Jiminy Cricket on my shoulder, you know, like.
And so, as churches move away from the law, they move into gospel myopticism, gospel everything.
They don't preach the law, they get rid of the third use of the law.
And to me, it's not a coincidence.
The moment that happens, that church becomes.
Or that individual or that nation, whatever it is, becomes immediately susceptible to things like critical theory, things like intersectionality, like identity politics.
And I think that would you agree that, like, that's a lot of what maybe I don't know if you could put more language to that, but I felt like that's what happened with your church.
Yeah, because you start to drift to this place, like Calvin's three uses of the law is that the law convicts us of our sin, the law is of use to the magistrate.
To show how to rightly rule.
And then the third use, and this is the one that gets a lot of people tangling up all the time, is that it shows the Christian how they can rightly obey God.
And it shows the Christian, like, hey, this is what pleases God obedience.
And that isn't your salvation, but it works from your being justified in Christ.
You're saved by grace alone through faith alone.
And it's not a faith that is alone.
Like your faith, once you're regenerate, you're going to obey.
And obedience is like a cuss word.
You say obedience or duty, duty is another one.
We like to say roles instead of duty.
No, you're right.
And it's one of those things where we adopt a lot of language that is just, I mean, honestly, it's hollow and deceptive philosophy.
That's like one of my favorite passages of scripture.
Postmodernism has kind of crept into the church and get into it.
Go for it.
Yeah.
So, so kind of how we think in terms of what scripture is like the first question that Satan asks is, did God really say?
Right.
And we look at that in terms of, you know, what is God really saying here?
Questioning what's in the text, which it's fine to ask questions about the text.
But then when you start approaching the text with critical questions, there's this guy.
Derrida, this is a lot of like the postmodernism stuff, but specifically, he's about deconstructionism, right?
As I call it like reforming or deforming, they're all about simper deformanda.
We're all about simper reformanda.
So it's like you're either in one of those two camps where deconstruction is the camp of postmodernism.
So you have Derrida, and his thing is, he says authorial intent has nothing to do with the text.
It's all terms that are couched in other things.
You say something like freedom or mankind.
And he means something entirely different.
It's all this package of all these different secret cultural things that are hiding in the background.
And when you say that word, it actually means something that is not what the word's meaning is.
So you start peeling apart stuff.
And this is where we see that suddenly now whiteness.
If you've seen that thing from the Smithsonian, it's like a package of privileges that the Smithsonian Institute put out on whiteness.
It's not whiteness, it's Western culture, which stems from they based it out of British common law.
And British common law, where did they get that from?
The Ten Commandments.
Yeah.
That's where they got their system of thinking about how to be just.
And so what they're trying to do is race back down.
As quickly as possible to the bottom of your brainstem and get you to be as tribal and emotional as possible.
And they want to reset it all the way back to that.
They talk about this even with social media, how it's a race to the bottom of the brainstem.
But ultimately, it's part of this system that is introduced in the garden in Genesis 3.
It's just questioning with, right?
That, oh, well.
I actually don't believe that's what that says.
And now you're searching out, not that what has God said, but something I heard recently was like, what are the women's voices in scripture?
And that's not what we're concerned about.
We're not worried about men's voices or women's voices.
We're worried about God hath said.
Yeah, God's voice.
God's voice.
That's right.
That's right.
And so we see the other part of it is when they buy into this, there's a couple of things that kind of come along with the package.
So there's a recent statement.
From Beth Moore saying that Paul isn't Jesus.
So it's kind of this red letter Bible theology.
Like it's this biblical theology of the only thing that matters is the red letters that are in there, and everything else is kind of like subtext.
Right.
As though the Apostle Paul and the Lord Jesus Christ in their inscripturated writings were at odds with one another.
That is such a destructive thing.
That's how you destroy the whole Bible.
That's what you're talking about.
That's deconstruction.
Destructive Dialectical Materialism00:05:07
You take something that's actually aligned where there's actually not any division and you insert division and you make them at war.
Go ahead.
This is really interesting.
That's what you just carried over into how this plays out.
It comes from two guys, Hegel and Marx.
And Hegel's thing is dialectical idealism, which is there's these two ideas.
One is the thesis, one is the system that we have now sitting up here.
And then here comes the antithesis.
And it's like, Hanging out, ready to fight, and they're both at odds.
And the only way for those two things to resolve to any form of truth is through conflict.
So the thesis and the structure and the antithesis, basically the tearing down of the structure.
And through that, their goal, and this is Marx played into this with materialism, but for Hegel, it's idealism.
It's how do we get to this experience of God?
And his triangle, Hegel had a triangle of religion.
Philosophy and art.
And so when we look around, we see that philosophy and art are completely inundated with this system.
Religion is the one that's behind the power curve.
And so they're trying to push this in as best they can to get it into the church, to destroy it through pitting everything against each other and out of order, or rather out of chaos will come order.
And so then we see it with Marx, right?
And that's dialectical materialism.
So it's, we don't have ideals, there is no ideal.
There is no morality.
There's no transcendent value.
There is only the revolution, which is material stuff.
Go ahead.
Power structures.
Yeah.
So it's all these things are outward representations.
So, it's kind of a blending of the two where you see it like, why are you burning down buildings?
Because it's destroying the structures that exist and something new will emerge that's supposedly better.
And that's what we're looking at with scripture because the basis of the system, when a postmodern epistemology, how I know what I know, how I think and arrive at truth claims, their founding statement is A is not A.
So, no two A's are alike.
There is no A. There's only this weird mix of my idea of A.
So that's their system of thinking, completely pitting one thing against the other in conflict.
And here's a perpetual resolution into what's called synthesis.
So you have your thesis, which is what would be constitutional America.
And then you have your antithesis, which is whatever other case is coming into the picture, whatever system you want to replace that.
And, or for the church, for instance, it would be scripture as the foundation.
Well, we want to push back and say that, like, well, we can't really know anything that's in the scripture because these men wrote scripture and what was their influence?
Right.
So now we start asking questions to try and resolve to this synthesis where it's pitting those two things against each other, destroying everything and emerging with something new.
And it's always what I call deforming, but that's that synthesis where those two things are pitted together.
We don't believe it's true and we're searching for what's valuable.
So, I'll apply this real quick.
Is recently there was a someone was asking the question of where are the women's voices in scripture earlier?
That's their question is we're looking for something very specific that's not the author, it's not his intent.
So, we got to remove that intent and now we can start picking apart everything through again Derrida's deconstructionism.
So, it's this vicious cycle.
Of just all these different systems and how we view scripture coming together and just destroying scripture in the long run.
Yep, I completely agree.
And I think I can't remember who said it, but I think for you and I, the idea of just completely demolishing and deconstructing everything, our sentiment is that that's going to lend towards chaos.
That's going to lend toward it.
It's going to be a disimprovement.
It's not going to make things better, it's going to make things worse.
And so sometimes I just sit back and I wonder, like, why are people so dead set on just seeing the world burn?
You know, like the Joker, you know, on Batman Returns, you know, some people just, you know, Alfred says some people just want to watch the world burn.
And it's just like, that's a hard person for me to understand, you know, because I feel like there's always an incentive.
You know, you want power, you want money, you want, you know, something.
And I think there is an incentive.
I think there, you know, I think there's a deep desire for power.
But then the question is, like, well, how are you going to get power if you just burn everything down?
Theistic Evolution Worldview00:06:46
How is that connected?
Because you and I, we see it as just like everybody's left with nothing.
But then people think that, like, if they burn everything down, if they deconstruct everything, that there'll be a positive result.
And I'm like, where does that principle, where does that concept even come from?
And then, you know, like, you start to think, you know, like, oh, I know where that comes from.
It comes from our public schools, it comes from evolution, it comes from the Big Bang.
Like, if you.
At your earliest ages, have been taught and have subscribed to the idea that order comes out of chaos?
That's why, as Christians, theistic evolution is a false doctrine.
We reject that.
God did not create the world by using evolution as his tool.
For one, we believe that death entered the world through sin.
Whereas if God, so just replace the Big Bang with God, but still keep everything else that evolution.
Theorizes and you have theistic evolution.
But if even if that were the case, even if we replace the Big Bang with God, we have theistic evolution, God using evolution over millions of years in order to eventually build up to Adam and Eve.
Well, then what we have ultimately when we say God using evolution as his tool to create, what we're really saying is that God's using death as his tool to create because that's what evolution is all about.
Evolution is that you have this high, highly intelligent, well crafted life form.
But it's sitting on top of a mountain of skeletons.
It only came to be through not just millions of years, right?
We always think of that when we think of evolution, but really it came to be over millions and trillions, even of deaths.
Deaths.
Like this little organism came and lived for, you know, three and a half minutes, but it didn't, you know, it only had half of a lung, you know, and it wasn't fully, and it died, you know, but a better organism and it died and it died and it died.
And we're not just Talking about single cell organisms.
We're not just talking about a mitigated entropy.
And we're talking about animals.
We're talking about highly complex physical beings, all the way up to Homo erectus.
And then you're talking about man like creatures.
And you're not just talking about a few of them died.
You're talking like millions of them had to live for at least a couple hundred thousand years.
And speaking of Homo erectus, a type of Man and died all these organisms, all the way up to finally you have a fully functioning, developed male Homo sapien and female Homo sapien.
And then God breathes his breath into them and they have a soul.
And finally, God did it.
God created man.
But on a mountain of death, and the reason we would reject that is for a number of reasons, but one of the simplest reasons that I always give to Christians who subscribe to evolution.
And think that evolution is somehow, you know, can be cohesive with biblical teaching, which is completely at odds.
In the same way that Marxism and the same way that socialism and, you know, the same way that critical theory and like evolution also, it is a demonic ideology.
It is at odds.
It can't be used as an analytical tool.
It can't be separated from its ultimate worldview.
It's attached to a worldview.
It says something about God.
And if nothing else, what evolution says about God, if it were true, if evolution were.
The way that God created all the things that we see today, what it would say about God is that God created life by using death, which would say that God is a liar in Genesis chapter three when his word tells us that death entered the world through sin.
Well, if evolution, if theistic evolution is true, then no, death entered the world through God because he had to use it.
God was dependent on death in order to ultimately create life.
And so we would have trillions of deaths.
Way before we ever got to Genesis 3, way before there ever was a garden, way before there ever was Adam and Eve, and way before God ever gave them his law, a positive precept, his natural law, the Ten Commandments written on both of their hearts.
And in addition to that, one positive law, one precept, namely, thou shalt not eat of the tree, of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Way before we ever got there, and the first sin, the first sin, of course, would be Lucifer, but the first sin from man, Before we ever get to the first sin, which God says that's the reason death entered the world.
That's the reason why the whole world is groaning, why everything is ultimately dying and groaning and with eager expectations, wanting the sons of God to be revealed and for Jesus to restore all things.
The reason why the world is in this state of death that it is, is because of sin.
But theistic evolution teaches the exact opposite.
It says death came along.
Millions, if not billions of years before sin ever entered the world, death was not introduced by man and his rebellion against God.
It was introduced by God himself, and God introduced it precisely because he had to.
He was dependent upon death as his tool to create life.
He could not create life without it.
And my whole point in saying all that is one, Christians, you know, that's just kind of a little freebie.
Christians, please reject evolution and its teachings.
He is taking, yeah, it's an oxymoron, a jumbo shrimp.
You know, like, yeah, so, you know, or like an intelligent Democrat, you know, it's just an oxymoron.
It just doesn't, got him, just doesn't even exist, right?
Theistic evolution.
But aside from just that being its own side point, if you have a whole generation of people and it has seeped into Christians, right, it's become this Christian doctrine of theistic evolution.
So it's in the church, it's certainly in the world.
If an entire generation of millennials, Have been discipled because that's what schools do.
That's what the public school does disciples children and indoctrinates them.
So, if they've been discipled and taught that life comes from death, right, that order comes from chaos, then why wouldn't they burn things down to get what they want?
Reformation Not Revolution00:05:58
It makes logical sense.
I mean, it doesn't make logical sense, but in their minds, because logic has long been cast aside and they wouldn't know logic if it slapped them in the face.
So, because they've gotten rid of the logic, Right, the logos, the word, Christ, because they've gotten rid of God's law, they've gotten rid of God's logic, they've gotten rid of God's word.
Then, in their minds, like, so all that back to what I was originally saying is just like for you and I, we see deconstructionism as just this completely fallacious, illogical, silly, and ultimately is dangerous, but this silly notion that by destroying something, I could improve it.
We're like, we still have that mindset of like, if something's broken, you don't just throw it away.
But you look for the problem.
And like if my car's not running, it doesn't mean the whole car is systematically broken.
It doesn't mean my whole car is systematically racist, right?
It just means it could just be that one piston isn't firing the way that it's supposed to.
It could just mean that, you know what I mean?
And so what we do is we begin to investigate.
And if we find one thing wrong, we don't say that that one thing substantiates our theory that the whole thing is broke.
No, we just say, all that proves, if I find one.
Bug, that doesn't mean it's the feature.
It just means I found one bug.
Now, there could be some more, but finding one problem does not substantiate a theory that the whole thing from floor to ceiling is completely broke.
And so we're still of a mindset, you and I, and biblical Christians, that if something's broke, ultimately, you don't just throw it on the ash heap and burn it and think that magically some utopian problem solving worldview will arise from the ashes.
No, like if something's broke, we have to do the hard work.
Of fixing it.
That's the whole thing.
I love what you said, like the semper deformanda versus semper reformanda.
We reform.
So we take what God's given us and we say, man, this is wonderful.
The Constitution of the United States of America is wonderful.
And the fact that our nation had race based slavery for as long as it did, we see that as a bug, not a feature.
And so we don't say, we need to get rid of the Constitution or we need to get rid of You know, the whole system of two or three witnesses, and we need to get rid of, you know, like, no, we say we need to reform.
We need to reform things.
There are isolated pieces of systems.
We find it in our government, we find it in our culture, we find it in the church.
And wherever we find something that's not in line with the truth of God's word, we want to reform it.
We want to change that.
We want to fix it.
What we don't want to do is take the baby with the bathwater and throw the whole thing out and then just sit back on our haunches and assume that magically something will come.
Yeah.
So, anyways, I'm saying all that to say I completely agree with you.
It's reforming rather than deforming.
It's reformation, not revolution.
It's not just taking the whole thing and saying it's all bad.
Let's throw it all away.
And then just imagine that if we burn it all down, like the Joker, right?
Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Like the Joker wanted to watch the world burn because he liked chaos, because he's clinically insane.
I think people today, they're not clinically insane.
They want to watch the world burn because not because they just, they're insane and they enjoy chaos.
They want to watch the world burn because they've been taught from grade school that chaos produces order.
They've been taught a lot.
And they actually think that deforming will ultimately improve something.
And they've just been played.
We just live in a generation that's been played.
There's a, I copied down this verse real quick that I found incredibly helpful.
With this, because it's always this idea of maybe we'll arrive at the truth at some point.
Like we have God's word, it's right here in front of us.
And 1 Timothy 3 5 through 7 says, Holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power, avoid such men as these.
For among them are those who enter into households and captivate weak women, weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses.
And this is the key, verse 7 always learning and never able to come to knowledge of the truth.
That's right.
Just as Janus and Jambrus opposed Moses.
So these men also oppose the truth.
Men of depraved mind rejected in regard to the faith.
And the whole thing is just disintegrating any form of another thing they bring up is propositional logic.
And it's like, well, no, we appeal to a standard and we reason from that standard.
And that's biblical.
You look at Exodus 20, right?
The fourth commandment, verses 8 through 11.
Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God.
In it you shall not do any of your work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female servant, or your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you.
For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day.
Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
He appeals to creation, to a six day creation, right?
And then On top of that, he's using propositional logic according to the standards of Scripture.
Biblical Patriarchy Explained00:03:58
Yep.
God created male and female.
He went through everything that we need to know in Genesis.
And so we're going to work out from that.
And here it is in Scripture, laid out right in front of us.
We'll still deny it.
Right.
Yep.
You're right.
Yeah.
We just keep getting cute with the text.
And yeah, it was just like, how do we know that's what it really means?
Who are you to say what God means by his word?
It's like, Yeah, and but we just we lose everything.
We lose every premise.
We lose every foundation.
Yeah, and the world the world will not improve through those kinds of means.
Well, we try to keep our episodes typically around I don't know, anywhere from some of them are shorter, 35 minutes, some of them are longer.
So we've gone about an hour.
So let's let's do this.
I want you to give give you a chance just to tell our listeners how they can follow your podcast and follow you and some of the things you're doing.
And also, we, for our club members, if you haven't already become a responder, we encourage you guys listening to this podcast to become a responder.
That's what we call our club members.
That's the only way this ministry can continue is through your generous prayers and support.
And our responders, one of the kind of incentives that we give to you as our thank you for your support is we have our bonus reel.
So each of our guests that we're hosting on this podcast, the Algae Applied, we have them stay on a little bit.
A little bit after we end the episode for our kind of behind the scenes conversation, our bonus hour.
And so, our bonus question for Dave is You, Dave, I know because you're a friend of mine, we've talked about it.
You personally subscribe not merely to complementarianism, but what you would describe as biblical patriarchy.
And so, I was wondering if you would stay on for our bonus edition conversation with me and you for just a few more minutes and explain this view, biblical patriarchy, and why you choose.
To hold to it.
So, me and Dave are going to come back.
We'll do a bonus thing.
But as we end the podcast, Dave, would you just tell our listeners a little bit about what you're doing and how they can keep up with you?
Yeah.
And thanks again for having me on and giving me an opportunity to just work through some of the Word of God and looking at what it's doing in the world, in the real world that's right around us.
You can check out our website at reformedoperator.com.
We have a podcast available basically anywhere you can find a podcast.
We're there.
Reformed operator.
You can follow us on Twitter or Instagram.
We update that pretty regularly.
And we use the McShane reading plan.
So you can follow us on Twitter.
And we have also a Westminster standards reading plan as well that's included on there that we try to update every day on Twitter.
So yeah, that's how you can get a hold of us.
And again, thanks a lot for having me on.
Absolutely.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Appreciate it.
All right.
That concludes our show.
Thanks, everybody, for tuning in.
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And I'm going to stay on a little bit longer and talk to Dave about biblical patriarchy, which I have no doubt will prove to be interesting and probably a bit controversial.
All right, later.
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